An ongoing IT issue is plaguing airline operations across the globe on Friday. As of 8 a.m. ET, there were nearly 2,700 cancelled flights globally, according to data from aviation analytics company Cirium.
In the U.S., carriers have cancelled 1,017 flights, or 4.2% of their planned schedule, so far. American, Delta, and United say they have resumed some flights while Southwest has remained largely unaffected by the outage.
Other non-U.S.-based carriers, including Air France, KLM, and Singapore Airlines, also reported IT troubles on Friday.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it is “closely monitoring” the issue in a statement. “Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops for their fleets until the issue is resolved. For more information, monitor fly.faa.gov for updates,” the agency added.
U.S. carriers were scheduled to operate 27,000 flights on Friday, carrying up to 3.7 million passengers.
What Happened
Airlines around the world are experiencing major IT issues, leading to widespread flight disruptions. The problems reportedly stem from a software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that has caused computers running Microsoft Windows to crash.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz announced on social media that the issue had been identified and isolated, and engineers had deployed a fix. However, the outage has already impacted airlines, airports, banks, media companies, and other institutions globally.
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We…
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024
The situation is still developing, and it remains to be seen how quickly the fix will resolve the issues.
