George Kurtz travel tips

A widespread outage of CrowdStrike, a major cybersecurity provider, has caused chaos in the U.S. aviation industry today, resulting in thousands of flight cancellations worldwide. The technical issue has affected multiple airlines and airports, leaving countless passengers stranded and scrambling to adjust their travel plans.

Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm with thousands of customers globally, admitted on Friday that a defective software update had caused the major IT outage that brought airports, banks, hospitals, media outlets, and businesses to a halt worldwide.

The mass IT outage is causing problems for everyone — even Mickey Mouse.

A global Microsoft outage disrupted IT systems around the world on Friday, canceling over a thousand US flights and delaying hundreds more. As a result, major US airlines including American Airlines, United, and Delta requested global ground stops on all flights Friday morning, per the FAA. As of 11 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, there were 1,692 canceled flights from US origins, out of 3,861 flights cancelled globally, according to data from Cirium, an aviation analytics company.

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.