Microsoft Outage Persists, Travel Heavily Impacted

Thousands of businesses worldwide lost all working capabilities on Friday due to a Microsoft issue, stranding travelers at airports for the entire weekend.

The issue first occurred in Australia when the day began on July 19, as Windows users updated the cybersecurity on their computers. The same problem then spread around the world, with users in Asia, Europe, Africa, and then the Americas going down. At the core of the outage was Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity software company, who soon found that the root of the problem was because they had sent out a faulty update to Windows devices. Microsoft later announced that at least 8.5 million computers had gone down due to the outage.

This issue showed how much modern-day businesses depend on Microsoft's technology, as the infamous blue screen of death affected everyone from travelers to big businesses to shoppers. Stores had to close down, airlines like American, Delta, and United canceled all flights, radios and TV channels went off-air, border crossings were slowed down, driver's license offices were closed, and hospital visits were stopped for the day, just to name a few. Some of Times Square's famed billboards even went dark due to the massive outage, with one expert even calling the incident "the largest IT outage in history."

American aviation has suffered quite a lot throughout this entire problem, as over 8,500 flights across major airlines like Delta, United, and American have been canceled since Friday. Around 35% of all of Delta's flights on the weekend were canceled and another 46% were delayed, and American and United suffered similar problems. In fact, the lowest number of canceled flights that Delta had on any day this weekend was an astounding 1,207 flights, with the highest being 1,385 flights on Sunday, according to FlightAware. As the busiest in the world and Delta's home airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International took one of the biggest hits, topping the cancellations list every day so far since Friday. 34% of all outbound flights were canceled and another 43% were delayed, while 31% of inbound flights were canceled and another 43% were delayed.

The problem is slowly being resolved, with the number of total cancellations coming down from about 3,000 on July 22 to 2,500 on July 23 and 1,900 on July 24, but Delta and Hartsfield-Jackson are still suffering from outages. Over half of Delta's systems work on Windows, and each system must be manually rebooted after implementing the fix-- meaning that each individual gate must be repaired and rebooted.

Due to this tedious process, problems with the airline have continued. 29% of Delta's flights on July 22 were canceled, a total of 1129 flights, and another 45% were delayed, while Atlanta's airport reported that 17% of outbound flights were canceled and 47% were delayed while 23% of inbound flights were canceled and 40% were delayed. From another perspective, only 1% of American Airlines' flights were canceled during the same period of time, and just around 0.6% of United Airlines' flights were canceled.

On July 23, 14% of Delta's flights were canceled, a total of 508 flights, and another 45% were delayed, while Atlanta's airport reported that 9% of outbound flights were canceled and 53% were delayed while 11% of inbound flights were canceled and 45% were delayed. As gates slowly got up and running, cancellations decreased but the number of delayed flights increased, as shown in the statistics above.

Unfortunately, the continuing problems for the aviation industry mean more misery for travelers. Some tourists have had to sleep at airports for days, napping on couches, their luggage, and even the floor.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian released a letter apologizing to travelers, detailing how this issue happened to occur on one of the busiest travel weekends of the summer-- over 90% of all seats on flights were booked. Delta is now offering travel waivers to some passengers who were impacted, which includes hotel rooms, meal vouchers, and transportation in addition to giving away SkyMiles and travel vouchers. They have also completely stopped all travel for unaccompanied minors through July 23, as they need to get everything up and running again before those operations can resume.

To add onto the issue, Crowdstrike stated that they may not have a widespread fix for a while, extending the wait for customers like Delta, who are canceling hundreds of flights each day.

This article has been updated with additional information over time.