On Friday, the world of travel went back to pre-technology for a while as a global IT outage rendered around 8.5 million Windows devices unusable, Microsoft has confirmed. With computers around the world showing “blue screens of death”, automatic services stopped across different industries.
While some airlines and airports tried to continue operations manually to the best possible extent, US airlines issued a global ground stop, with no take offs allowed for several hours. Train services, TV and radio stations, bank and hospital systems and stock exchanges were all affected.
The CEO of CrowdStrike, a company producing antivirus software that introduced an update leading to the outage, George Kurtz, has apologises and said a solution was promptly deployed. However, while most devices and services came back online, airlines are still forced to cancel flights days later.
Even with the flawed update rolled back, airlines have computers at thousands of gates that will need to be individually manually rebooted, David Kennedy, cofounder of cybersecurity company Binary Defense, has told CNN. “It’s not just as simple as rebooting. There’s a lot more steps and complexities in this that are involved “There’s just not enough people at those airports, at those locations to go and do it”, Kennedy explained.
In the aftermath, on Saturday, over 2,100 flights were cancelled in the US, about 400 from United alone, and more than 21,300 delayed. Yesterday, problems still persisted, with another 1,600 cancelled flights, 1,000 of which just from Delta and 200 from United, and an additional 8,500 delays. More cancellations and delays are expected today, with no clear numbers revealed at the time of writing.
“Cancelling a flight is always a last resort, and something we don’t take lightly”, Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a statement. “The technology issue occurred on the busiest travel weekend of the summer, with our booked loads exceeding 90%, limiting our reaccommodation capabilities.”
Over in Europe, the situation seems a little more under control. Only 68 flights were cancelled by easyJet on Sunday in and out of London Gatwick and today a mere 3. Other airlines in and out of the UK have single digit cancellation figures, according to the Independent, with no serious numbers reported so far elsewhere on the continent.
Even after all the computers are fixed and planes start flying again, the backlog of delays is likely to take days, if not weeks, to get through and resolve. A UK air traffic control malfunction last year caused several days of disturbances, so a global outage is likely to have a more lasting impact.
