Photos show the chaos behind the global IT outage that's impacting retailers, flights, and hospitals

Once a novelty beverage, boba or bubble tea has moved into the mainstream.

As we were preparing to land at Orlando International Airport (MCO) during a recent Delta Air Lines flight, a friendly attendant handed me and a few other passengers a card with a handwritten thank-you note on the back. I had never received such a note, nor had I known they existed. I immediately texted my trusted co-worker and fellow frequent flyer Clint Henderson for some insight.

While commercial air service was slowly recovering on Friday after a technology outage caused thousands of flights worldwide to be canceled or delayed, the ripple effect from the disruption left airports crowded with passengers and airlines working to get planes and crews back in position.

In the middle of the pandemic, my phone pinged with an email from InterNations, an expat group I had joined after spending time in Switzerland.

Friday 19 July was set to be one of the busiest days of the summer for Europe’s airports. But the world’s biggest IT outage had other plans for hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers.

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.

When I visited the Colosseum in Rome for the first time, I wanted to experience stunning views that would transport me to the past.

If you were flying — or planned to fly — last week, your travel plans might have been snarled by an I.T. outage that kneecapped myriad industries and critical services worldwide. On Friday, July 19, alone, nearly 14 percent of the scheduled flights in the United States were canceled and 56 percent were delayed, according to Cirium, an aviation data company. In the days following, Delta Air Lines and other carriers continued to cancel and delay flights as they struggled with crews and planes out of position and the rebooking of thousands of passengers.

A fierce diurnal wind is gusting up the Kali Gandaki valley in Mustang, an isolated region in central Nepal, suffusing the austere terrain with drama and motion. It whips the thousands of prayer flags into a frenzy and relieves unsuspecting visitors of their hats. The powerful wind is the breath of this land; its heart is the Kali Gandaki, the river that originates in the north, near the Tibetan border, and empties into the Ganges. Over centuries the wind and the river have carved this gorge out of the Annapurna range, part of a 500-mile band that contains some of the Himalayas’ proudest peaks. But all are dwarfed by a single form looming 23,000 feet above, somehow both near and far: the triple-peaked, snowcapped Nilgiri Himal, which keeps watch over its dominion below.

A day after a tech outage disrupted industries worldwide, airlines are digging themselves out from the fallout of thousands of delayed and canceled flights that have left travelers stranded and searching to find a way home over the weekend.

Nothing screams summer in New England quite like a day trip to the shores of Martha's Vineyard — something tourists have been doing for well over 100 years.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Ahmed Al Sharif, 32, the CTO of Sandsoft, a game developer. Al Sharif was stranded at Barcelona airport on Friday because of the IT outage disrupting travel and other services. The following has been edited for length and clarity.