Watch Air Traffic Disintegrate In Real Time From The CrowdStrike Outage

Air travel in the U.S. is a busy business, one that sees 45,000 flights serving 2.9 million each day, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Our frenzied skies got a little calmer early Friday morning however, as the CrowdStrike software outage impacted United, Delta and American Airlines—the three largest airlines in the U.S.

Airlines Have to Pay Up for Poor Service

This tweet comes to us via extreme weather watcher Colin McCarthy over on his Twitter/X account, @US_Stormwatch

As of this writing, Airlines have canceled over 1,000 flights and delayed 1,700 more, according to USA Today. Airlines are currently up and running, though certain systems remain down. Some airlines are taking desperate measures to get wheels up, like at the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport:

The problem lies in an update from the Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike not playing well with some Microsoft systems, as USA Today explains:

Around the world, airports and airlines advised customers to arrive earlier than normal for flights. Analysts said the outage was likely tied to a glitch in Microsoft software used globally.

Microsoft said users might be unable to access various Office 365 apps and services due to a “configuration change in a portion of our Azure-backed workloads.”

According to an alert sent by Crowdstrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death.”

The alert, sent at 1:30 a.m. ET on Friday, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue. A Crowdstrike spokesperson did not respond to emails or calls requesting comment.

It’s not just here in the good ol’ US of A that is seeing a huge spike in canceled flights. The failure of the CrowdStrike software Thursday has left airports around the world in chaos. Everywhere from Germany to Chile are experiencing outages, though some airports remain unaffected. France’s airports are free of the software outage, though Air France, Ryanair, Iberia are operating with certain systems down.