Businesses and governments worldwide experienced hours-long disruptions Friday as a widespread technology outage affected services across industries. Flights were grounded and numerous hospitals, small businesses and government offices were disrupted.

At the heart of the massive disruption is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.