Tyler Stitt and Angelica Nippard awoke at 4:30 a.m. Friday, July 19, and drove to Los Angeles International Airport, ready to fly to Denver for a family member’s wedding. But upon their arrival at LAX, they learned their flight had been cancelled.
After waiting three hours, they rushed to Hollywood-Burbank Airport, hoping to find a standby flight.
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“It’s cutting into precious family time,” said Stitt, standing by a check-on counter at that airport. “It’s really hectic and unsettling that a single technology failure could mess everything up this much.”
Stitt and Nippard were two of millions of travelers scrambling to get airborne after a technological issue affected check-in operations for United, Delta and American airlines.
A faulty update from CrowdStrike, a widely-used U.S. cybersecurity company, impacted computers using Microsoft Windows, the company said in a statement.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike said. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption.”
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Flights across the country and beyond were temporarily grounded on Friday, by the Federal Aviation Administration. Melbourne Airport in Australia was among the first to report it was “experiencing a global technology issue” that was impacting check-in procedures.
Canoga Park resident Boing Francisco’s Spirit Airlines flight from Burbank to Oakland was delayed five times Friday morning. The delays would make her late to see her father on his 92nd birthday.
“They said there’s a global outage happening and I’m really frustrated,” Francisco said. “It’s confusing, and I keep getting different information.”
The tech failure led to long lines and headaches at some Southern California airports, while others sidestepped most of the trouble.
Long Beach Airport had few problems, perhaps because Southwest Airlines has most of the flights there. Overall, flights went smoothly at Ontario Airport as well, albeit there were some delays. By early afternoon, the other airfields were in recover mode.
More than 100 flights had been canceled out of LAX and nearly 200 others delayed.
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Santa Clarita’s Jacen Torres and Alfonso Dominguez arrived at Los Angeles International around 9 a.m. and made their way to the back of the long line for United customers whose flights had been canceled, or rescheduled for Saturday, July 20. They were trying to get to Montana to vacation with other friends.
“It’s terrible,” Torres said. “We’re going to have to come back tomorrow.
“I can’t imagine if someone is flying for a wedding, funeral or work,” Torres added. “I just wish they could accommodate (passengers) better.”
Kiki Mendoza of Seal Beach said he had a feeling something was off when he and his family couldn’t confirm their Delta flight through an app on Thursday night. With a vacation to London planned, they arrived at 9 a.m. at LAX and had already gone through a couple of lines by 11 a.m. He was now in another one, with more than 90 people, to check in with an agent.
“We knew last night that something was up, so we made sure we got here early,” Mendoza said. “But it didn’t really help much, because everyone’s in the same boat.”
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By 2 p.m., LAX spokeswoman Dae Levine said all airlines were back online and “slowly recovering,” with some airlines still seeing flight delays of up to two to three hours.
“There’s a residual effect for an outage like this,” she said. “It will take us a little while to make sure everything is taken care of from the backlog.”
In the early afternoon, lines snaked through security at John Wayne Airport, which wasn’t unusually crowded.
Waiting inside Terminal A to drop off their bags were Travis and Gina Moffitt; the husband and wife were heading home to Tampa Bay from a conference.
Or at least they hoped that soon would be the case.
An airline representative told the dozens of people headed to Tampa they would have to wait another 35 minutes or so before they could check in, due to delays to earlier flights caused by the outage.
The Moffitts’ had been alerted in the morning that their flight would be delayed approximately three hours.
Just as the latest delay was announced, another Breeze employee assured the Moffitts that their aircraft was en route to John Wayne.
“I’m not frustrated,” Gina Moffitt said with a smile. “They can’t control that this happened. … So we’re here at the airport, and we’ll see how things go this afternoon.”
The outage affected shipments at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, especially in the early hours. “There were impacts, but I think most of it got worked out,” said Matt Schrap, chief executive officer for the Harbor Trucking Association.
Rachel Campbell, a Port of Los Angeles spokeswoman, said that only one container terminal at the port was affected, but it had recovered and was fully operational.
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The court system in Orange County struggled for a time, too, with officials pushing back at least some remote hearings to Monday.
“We are experiencing a technical issue with our systems today, which may cause delays in our work and service to the public,” said Kostas Kalaitzidis, the spokesman for Orange County Superior Court. “We are working through them to reestablish full service.”
By early afternoon, those systems were recovering.
Early Friday, it was also thought that the Los Angeles County Superior Court was experiencing technical issues related to the CrowdStrike bug. By later that evening, the court said in a statement that its issues were unrelated to the global outage — and was instead because of a ransomware attack.
Once the cybersecurity issue was discovered, the court said in a press release, officials shut down its network systems to prevent further harm. Those systems will remain disabled through the weekend.
The attack is under investigation, the court said, but as of Friday evening, it did not appear that users’ data was compromised.
Other Southern California public agencies, meanwhile, were in monitoring mode because of the CrowdStrike outage.
“(Police and fire) emergency operations have not been impacted at this time,” said Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Zach Seidl in a statement. “The mayor has been in touch with (LAX) leadership, who are working actively to resolve travel issues.”
Amtrak said the outage had prevented credit-card transactions for its Pacific Surfliner service. Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPay payments could be used to complete online reservations.
Southern California’s theme parks were not impacted much, if at all, representatives said.
“I think a lot of people around the country and around the world are shocked to discover that a single issue with a single case of software could have that many knock-on implications,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who paid a visit to Humphreys Avenue Elementary School in East Los Angeles on Friday to celebrate a $10 million grant toward the construction of a pedestrian and bicycle crossing over the 710 Freeway.
“I think that’ll be a question that really goes to the design of our systems for the long term,” he said.
Staff writers Sean Emery, Kristy Hutchings, Donna Littlejohn, Brady MacDonald and Destiny Torres, and correspondent Julianna Lozada contributed to this report.
