Passengers queued at London’s Gatwick Airport on Friday due to a global IT outage.
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Friday’s global tech outage continues into Saturday as employees at airlines, banks, hospitals and other essential businesses grapple with backlogs caused by the historic tech crash that affected 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide.
Airlines are playing their biggest game of catch-up on Friday after being forced to cancel thousands of flights, leaving planes and crews stranded in the wrong places. As of Saturday afternoon, nearly 1,500 flights Flights across the U.S. were canceled for the day, plus According to flight tracking website FlightAware, 4,600 flights were delayed.
Meanwhile, stranded travelers also expressed their frustration.
“My whole trip was more or less ruined,” Mariah Grant, an American who was stranded after her flight to New York was severely delayed by a power outage, told NPR London.
Grant also called the experience humbling.
“I think this all speaks to the fact that we are so reliant on technology,” she said, adding that she was grateful to customer service representatives at London Gatwick Airport who helped put her mind at ease and rebook her flight.
“This experience really taught me how much humans we still need to be able to cope with what happens when technology fails us,” Grant said.
Hospitals are also experiencing backlogs after being forced to cancel appointments, including elective surgeries.
Boston-based Brigham General Hospital in Massachusetts said it had resumed operations on Saturday after canceling all non-urgent surgeries and other appointments on Friday because of the power outage.
“Our response teams continued to work diligently throughout the weekend to address the many additional downstream impacts of the CrowdStrike outage on our systems,” Noah Brown, the hospital’s director of global communications, told NPR in a written statement .
Microsoft users around the world found themselves offline after a flawed software update was released by a cybersecurity group called CrowdStrike.
Austin-based CrowdStrike said in a statement that it was “actively working with customers whose screens were affected by this incident” and confirmed it was not a cyber attack.
On Saturday, Microsoft said the CrowdStrike update affected 8.5 million devices, less than 1% of all Windows machines.
“Although the percentage is small, the broad economic and social impact reflects the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises running many critical services,” David Weston, Microsoft’s vice president of enterprise and operating system security, wrote in a blog post.
