Global IT Outage Continues to Delay Thousands of Travelers

More than 1,600 flights were canceled Monday as the airline industry and others continued to regroup from a massive, global IT outage that hit just before the start of the weekend. 

Millions of Windows PCs supporting hospitals, 911 systems, banks and media organizations, in addition to airlines and airports, crashed early Friday morning after the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike sent out a faulty update to Windows systems that crashed them and left many users staring at what's known as a "blue screen of death."

CrowdStrike said it quickly identified and fixed the problem, adding that its systems are now operating normally and that its customers remain protected from cyberthreats. Mac and Linux systems weren't affected.

"We understand the gravity of this situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption," the company added,

But at the same time, CEO George Kurtz warned that customers need to be on guard for online attackers who might try to profit from the chaos.

"We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this," Kurtz said. "I encourage everyone to remain vigilant and ensure that you're engaging with official CrowdStrike representatives."

Meanwhile, the ripple effect of the outage continued to linger.

According to the flight-tracking website FlightAware, more than 1,600 flights were canceled on Monday, with another 30,000 delayed. That was down from Friday's totals of more than 5,000 cancellations and 46,000 delays.

Much of the chaos involved Delta Airlines, which accounted for about 800 of Monday's cancellations. By Saturday night, hundreds of complaints had been filed against the airline with the US Department of Transportation citing the continued disruptions, along with "unacceptable customer service conditions," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a post on the social media platform X.

"I have made clear to Delta that we will hold them to all applicable passenger protections," Buttigieg said in his post.

Buttigieg said that Delta is required to provide prompt refunds to consumers who choose to not rebook, along with timely reimbursements for food and hotels to those affected by the delays and cancellations, as well as "adequate customer service assistance."

"No one should be stranded at an airport overnight or stuck on hold for hours waiting to talk to a customer service agent," Buttigieg said, encouraging customers to report airlines who don't to his department.

Delta said Monday afternoon that it's working to get its systems back on track, noting that about half of its IT systems are Windows based and that the software error forced its IT teams to manually repair and reboot each of them, then allow each system's applications to sync and start communicating with each other again.

The airline added that the system it uses to make sure that all flights have a full crew in the right place at the right time is "deeply complex and is requiring the most time and manual support to synchronize."