Global IT Outage Grounds 1,000s of Flights: Latest Updates
19.07.2024 - 10:53
/ skift.com
/ George Kurtz
Airlines around the world are grounding flights as a global IT outage impacts operations. Companies in the United States, UK, India, and Australia are among those badly affected.
Delta Air Lines has “paused” all flights in its global network as it “works through a vendor technology issue.” United Airlines also confirmed it is halting all new departures, with the problems “impacting [its] ability to access reservation tools” for rebooking passengers.
As of 6:00am ET (10:00am GMT), aviation analytics firm Cirium said 1,390 flights had been canceled globally on Friday, with thousands more delayed. This number is expected to rise throughout the day. It is not immediately clear how many of the cancellations are directly related to the IT problem.
Dutch national carrier KLM said on X that the cyber challenges had made “flight handling impossible.” It added that it has “largely suspended operations” until further notice.
All Delta flights are paused as we work through a vendor technology issue.
Any customers whose flights are impacted will be notified by Delta via the Fly Delta app and text message. Customers should use the Fly Delta app for updates.
The root cause of the problem appears to be a software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. George Kurtz, the company’s CEO, said on X that “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” was causing disruption to customers.
Kurtz added that the issue has since been “identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.” He said the outages were not caused by a security incident or cyber attack.
Even if the technical problem has been fixed, the knock-on impact to affected airlines and airports is likely to continue throughout the day, and could get worse before it gets better.
Earlier Microsoft said it was taking “mitigation actions” after service issues, according to the AFP news agency. Heathrow Airport was among the big name organizations to reference Microsoft in its statement on the issue. Microsoft said the outage started around 6pm ET (10pm GMT) on Thursday.
Plane tracking service Flightradar24 reported severe delays affecting arrivals and departures at major airports around the world.
We are following reports of a Microsoft outage affecting airlines and airports all around the world. Delays and cancellations are expected. pic.twitter.com/Tf7jy1Ov2m
Edinburgh Airport in Scotland is among those asking passengers due to travel today not to come to the terminal without checking with their airline first.
ℹ️| Update – IT system outage.
Passengers should not travel to the airport without first checking the status of their flight with their airline.
The wait at security is currently around one hour due to the outage and our teams are managing