Global IT Outage Spurs Cancellations of Thousands of Flights

In the U.S., carriers have canceled 1,017 flights, or 4.2 percent of their planned schedule, so far. American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines say they have resumed some flights while Southwest Airlines 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 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," the agency added. "For more information, monitor fly.faa.gov for updates.”

U.S. carriers were scheduled to operate 27,000 flights on Friday, carrying up to 3.7 million passengers.

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.

The situation is still developing, and it remains to be seen how quickly the fix will resolve the issues.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AirlineGeeks.com.