(ABC 6 News) — On Friday, a massive global tech outage crippled airlines, banks, emergency services, local governments, and even hospitals.

The cause of the outage was a failed software update conducted by CrowdStrike, and it is being considered the largest global IT outage in history.

Amidst the outage, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz issued an apology, saying, “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travelers, to anyone affected by this including our companies.”

Kurtz also posted on social media, “As this incident is resolved, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.”

At airports, travelers were left stranded with no information as screens displayed the so-called “blue screen of death” error message.

Only 47% of flights departed on time on Friday with 57% having a 30 minute delay or more in the U.S., according to a global analytics firm.

Additionally, ABC News found that at least 20 hospital systems were impacted by the outage with some even canceling elective procedures.

Minnesota Senator Tina Smith said, “I think it shows how dependent how reliant we are on technology, and what an outage can do to completely disrupt the flow of people and commerce.”

For now, the long-term effects of the outage remain unknown, but in Olmsted County, officials don’t expect significant effects to linger.