Cebu Pacific, AirAsia restore systems

MANILA, Philippines — Systems have been restored and no stranded passengers remain at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 3 following a global IT systems outage that affected airlines and banks since July 19, the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) said yesterday.

Cebu Pacific Air (CEB) said they have fully restored their system.

Cebu Pacific corporate communications director Carmina Romero said CEB’s technology provider Navitaire has completed restoring all its services and its underlying servers to “full capacity.”

“All systems are now operational and we plan to operate our normal flight schedules as we advise passengers with confirmed bookings to continue monitoring the status of their flights,” Romero said.

“We are grateful to our IT and airport staff who worked tirelessly to resolve the situation and assist the affected passengers at the NAIA Terminal 3,” she added.

AirAsia Philippines head of communications and public affairs and first officer Steve Dailisan said that as of Saturday, all their systems are back online.

“We ask for patience among our guests as we recover from multiple delays and cancellations as a result of the global IT outage since Friday that is beyond our control,” he said.

“As an airline that is guest-obsessed, the AirAsia team continues to work tirelessly to minimize disruptions and ensure our passengers stay well informed and adequately taken care of,” he added.

On July 19, a global IT systems outage crippled the flight operations of local and some foreign airlines, leaving thousands of departing passengers stranded at NAIA.

The MIAA announced the cancellation of 45 domestic and international flights due to the system outage.

Some 12,500 passengers of Cebu Pacific and around 13,000 AirAsia passengers were affected, as well as six foreign airlines operating at NAIA.

Global outage

In Paris, planes were gradually taking off again Saturday after global airlines, banks and media were thrown into turmoil by one of the biggest IT crashes in recent years, caused by an update to an antivirus program.

Passenger crowds had swelled at airports on Friday as dozens of flights were canceled after an update to a program operating on Microsoft Windows crashed systems worldwide.

By Saturday, officials said the situation had returned virtually to normal at airports across Germany and France, as Paris prepared to welcome millions for the Olympic Games starting on Friday.

Multiple US airlines and airports across Asia said they had resumed operations, with check-in services restored in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand and mostly back to normal in India, Indonesia and at Singapore’s Changi Airport as of Saturday afternoon.

Microsoft estimated Saturday that 8.5 million Windows devices were affected as the number amounted to less than one percent of all Windows machines.

“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,” it said.

Microsoft said the issue began on July 18, affecting Windows users running the CrowdStrike Falcon cybersecurity software.

In a Saturday blog post, CrowdStrike said it had released an update on Thursday night that had caused a system crash and the infamous “blue screen of death” fatal error message.

CrowdStrike said it had rolled out a fix for the problem and the company’s boss, George Kurtz, told US news channel CNBC he wanted to “personally apologize to every organization, every group and every person who has been impacted.”

The company said it could take a few days for the situation to return to normal.

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) was hobbled by the crash on Friday, preventing doctors from accessing patient records and booking appointments.

A “majority of systems... are now coming back online in most areas, however, they are still running slightly slower than usual,” an NHS spokesperson said, warning of disruption continuing into next week.

Media companies were also hit, with Britain’s Sky News saying the glitch had ended its Friday morning news broadcasts.

Australia’s ABC also reported major difficulties.

Australian, British and German authorities warned of an increase in scam and phishing attempts following the outage, including people offering to help reboot computers and asking for personal information or credit card details.

Banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported issues with their digital services, some mobile phone carriers were disrupted and customer services in several companies went down.

“The scale of this outage is unprecedented, and will no doubt go down in history,” said Junade Ali of Britain’s Institution of Engineering and Technology, adding that the last incident approaching the same scale was in 2017.