CrowdStrike issue causes major outage affecting businesses around the world

Kurtz apologized to those impacted in an interview on NBC News’ “Today” early Friday.

“I want to start with saying we’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” he said.

“The system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system. And now we are working with each and every customer to make sure that we can bring them back online.”

Kurtz added that the update was normal and part of the company’s routine process to prevent security risks, but noted that an investigation would be required to see what went wrong.

The confirmation came after widespread reports of technical issues, with many Microsoft users around the world facing an error screen known as the “blue screen of death.”

Airlines, hospitals and financial services firms were among the many businesses affected.

American Airlines, which describes itself as the world’s largest, said a technology issue was affecting “multiple carriers,” while the Dutch arm of Air France-KLM said it had been “forced to suspend most” of its operations.

In England, U.K., the Royal Surrey hospital declared a “critical incident” and had to temporarily suspend radiography treatment. The country’s National Health Service, meanwhile, said it was experiencing disruptions in the majority of doctors’ practices.

Banks and financial companies around the world have reported issues, with German insurance giant Allianz saying it was “experiencing a major outage that is impacting employees ability to log into their computers. It impacts multiple companies besides Allianz.”

NBC Universal is also being affected by the CrowdStrike outage.

See the latest updates on which companies are affected here.