Traveling Today? What You Need to Know About the Global Tech Outage.

25.07.2024 - 14:23 / nytimes.com / Pete Buttigieg

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.

“These flights, they run so tightly, so back to back, that even after a root cause is addressed, you can still be feeling those impacts throughout the day,” said Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, in an appearance on CNBC.

The outage was caused by a flawed update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, whose software is widely used around the world. At United Airlines, for example, the outage affected technology used to calculate aircraft weight, check in customers and operate call-center phone systems.

Throughout Friday, messages that travelers posted on social media showed flights grounded worldwide, some terminal monitors down and crowds of stranded passengers waiting at airport gates and customer service desks. At airports in India and South Korea, some passengers stood in long lines to obtain handwritten boarding passes.

Since the initial outage, service is slowly resuming, but the number of global delays and cancellations has continued to increase throughout the day.

Worldwide, around 110,000 commercial flights were scheduled on Friday, and around 5,117 of those flights, or 4.6 percent, have been canceled, according to Cirium, an aviation data company. In the United States, the number of cancellations stood at more than 2,300 — or about 9 percent of daily flights — as of Friday afternoon.