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 a number of 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.
FLIGHT CHAOS
While some airports halted all flights, in others airline staff resorted to manual check-ins for passengers, leading to long lines and frustrated travellers.
Thousands of US flights were grounded, although airlines later said they were re-establishing their services and working through the backlog.
A senior US administration official said Friday that “our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion remains”.
