Global IT Outage Continues, Thousands of Flights Canceled Across US

The worldwide IT breakdown that happened last week has caused the cancellation or delay of thousands of American flights.

According to sources, as of midday on July 21st, over 1,200 flights had been canceled, and over 4,600 were delayed. The majority of these incidents involved Delta and United.

After a problematic software update seemingly brought the worldwide airline sectors and several electronic transactions to a standstill, the CEO of one of the biggest cybersecurity companies worldwide has issued an apology.

George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm in Texas, rushed to social media early on Friday to admit that a flaw in a single Windows content update had caused a significant disruption in Microsoft operations. Kurtz claimed that it was not caused by bad actors and adamantly said it was neither a cyberattack nor a security breach.

Thousands of flights in the United States were among the more than 18,000 canceled worldwide. Other services that went down included banks, emergency 911 centers, and even killed The Sphere’s popular light show on The Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Rumors surfaced in 2017 that the Democrat National Committee (DNC) had been compromised by Russian hackers. The DNC informed news organizations that no intelligence agency, including the FBI, had ever conducted an impartial evaluation of the compromised servers of the organization. They said the FBI instead used data collected from Crowdstrike alone.

The FBI denied the report, saying the DNC had refused to let them examine the servers.

Forty percent of Delta’s fleet is experiencing some kind of delay, which is causing significant problems for the airline’s operations. The airline is now trying to get back on its feet. Like United Airlines, the business has allowed customers to reschedule their flights.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) requires all airlines to provide a refund in the event of a flight cancellation. Worldwide, United suffered 8% of the delays, and Delta had 40%.