Krispy Kreme giving away free doughnuts Friday due to global tech outage: What to know

Krispy Kreme is responding to Friday's global technology outage by offering customers a sweet treat for a limited time.

The doughnut chain is offering customers a free Original Glazed doughnut from 5-7 p.m. local time on Friday, no purchase necessary, the company said on Instagram.

"Sweet-ware update available! Does technology have you down today? Our windows are working great and so is our Hot Light," Krispy Kreme's Instagram post said. "Come on in and help yourself to a FREE Original Glazed Doughnut from 5-7 pm to add some sweetness to this sour day!"

The company says the offer is valid only at participating shops and is subject to product availability. Customers can redeem the offer in-shop or via the drive-thru, with a limit of one per guest.

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Tech outage hits airlines, banks, healthcare and public transit sectors

The technology outage grounded flights, hampered public transit systems and disrupted operations at banks and hospitals around the globe Friday in an incident a cybersecurity firm blamed on a faulty system update.

CrowdStrike, a U.S. firm that advertises being used by over half of Fortune 500 companies, said one of its recent content updates had a defect that impacted Microsoft's Windows Operating System, adding the incident was "not a security incident or cyberattack."

"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," said a statement from CrowdStrike. The company's CEO, George Kurtz, apologized for the disruptions in an interview with NBC's Today. Microsoft, meanwhile, said "the underlying cause has been fixed," but residual impacts will affect some of its Microsoft 365 apps and services.

In the U.S., hundreds of flights were canceled Friday morning. American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines were among those who grounded flights less than an hour after Microsoft said it resolved a cloud-services-related outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.

Public transit systems in the U.S. reported impacts. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, D.C., said its "website and some of our internal systems are currently down," but that trains and buses were running as scheduled. In New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority also said its buses and trains were unaffected but that "some MTA customer information systems are temporarily offline due to a worldwide technical outage."

Around the world, the outages disrupted London's Stock Exchange, caused major train delays in the U.K., sent British broadcaster Sky News off air, forced medical facilities in Europe and the U.S. to cancel some services and caused disruptions at airports in Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong and India.

Contributing: Kim Hjelmgaard, Christopher Cann, Felecia Wellington Radel and Arianna Rodriguez, USA TODAY

Gabe Hauari is a national trending news reporter at USA TODAY. You can follow him on X @GabeHauari or email him at [email protected].