The outage also affected media and banks with Kenya Airways acknowledging in a statement that the outage which is part of a larger global system disruption severely impacted their ability to process bookings efficiently.
Long queues, frustrated passengers, significant delays were the norm across major airports globally as airlines scrambles to mitigate the impacts of the outage.
Leading global airlines such as Delta and American Airlines issued a “global ground stop” on all their flights with experts working to return operations back to normalcy.
Flights that were airborne were allowed to continue, with those that were yet to take off grounded.
Companies including banks, hospitals and railway companies reported “widespread IT issues”.
Although little is known on what caused the outage that grounded thousands of flights, stalled banking and healthcare services, and badly hit other sectors, one thing that is clear is that its impacts will continue to be felt in the coming days.
Why China was unscathed by the global IT outage
One country was however spared the disruptions- China.
Operations at the Asian nation proceeded smoothly as its companies do not rely heavily on foreign IT systems.
In China, established companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei are the dominant cloud providers.
Government organisations, businesses and infrastructure operators have moved away from reliance on foreign IT systems to domestic ones which have paid off as evident during the global IT outage when China remained unscathed.
CrowdStrike explains cause of the global IT outage
The outage was caused by a single update pushed out from an anti-virus firm CrowdStrike based in the US.
CrowdStrike has admitted that the outage was as a result of an update to its antivirus software, which is designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.
Within minutes of updating its virus scanner Falcon, several companies reported IT challenges with very adverse effects on computers running Windows software.
"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed…This is not a security incident or cyber-attack." CrowdStrike boss George Kurtz explained.
Even as Blue Screen of Death was reported across the globe, Microsoft has said it is taking "mitigation action" to deal with "the lingering impact" of the outage.