Major IT outage impacts airports and airlines worldwide

Image of multiple planes on the ground at an airport

Planes have been grounded after a mass IT outage has affected companies including airlines, the media and banks

Major airlines worldwide including the US’s American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines issued ground stops earlier this morning, citing problems with communication.

The latest airlines to report disruption are German airline Lufthansa and Scandinavian Airlines (SAS).

At Indira Gandhi Airport in Delhi, the BBC has reported that the airport remains open, despite no electronic terminals being available for check-in, and lines to speak with an agent are lengthy and time-consuming. Travellers are being given blank boarding cards and baggage tags and have been asked to fill in their flight information manually, it said.

In New Zealand, Christchurch International Airport has said it is experiencing IT issues across several systems, which may affect flight arrivals and departures.

It is not yet clear what is causing the IT outage affecting companies around the world.

Earlier today American Airlines blamed a “technical issue with Crowdstrike” while the Swiss Federal Office for Cyber ​​Security told Reuters that a faulty update or misconfiguration by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike was behind the worldwide IT outage.

Budget US airlines including Frontier Airlines, Allegiant and Sun Country also had flights grounded. Frontier stated late on Thursday that it was beginning to resume normal operations. It claimed that a “major Microsoft technical outage” hit its operations temporarily, while Sun Country said a third-party vendor was affecting its booking and check-in facilities, without naming the company.

Microsoft said its outage started at about 6pm ET on Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the central US region.

The outage will also have a major impact on global repatriation, Marc Banting, Chief Operations Officer for the Voyageur Group (Voyageur24), said: “Repatriations today will be severely impacted, and while it may not be obviously impactful for patients expecting to be repatriated tomorrow, if the medical escorts cannot get there today, the repatriation will have to be rescheduled. This will result in further costs in medical facilities. Although not all airlines are affected, escorts could have a lengthy wait at borders as airport border controls are experiencing lengthy delays.”

Allianz Partners has announced it will provide Paris 2024 assistance services.

Southern Cross Travel Insurance CEO, Ms Jo McCauley: commented: 

"While Southern Cross Travel Insurance’s own operations have not been affected by the Crowdstrike issue, unfortunately some of our customers are experiencing delays and disruption as a result.

We advise customers to contact their airline or travel agent to make alternative arrangements which may take some time. We encourage people to be kind and patient as everyone works on a solution.

We will be covering claimable losses caused by this event, provided all other conditions and criteria for cover are met (and subject to any limits, sub-limits and/or any exclusions applying) and advise customers to keep all receipts they may have to make it easier to process a claim.

Our thoughts are with any traveller affected by the disruption and we’re hopeful things get back on track as soon as possible."

Pamela Munoz of Cover Genius told ITIJ: "Multiple industries have been hit by the unexpected today. Historically, claims for events like these can take anywhere from 30-90 days to settle. With embedded protection, however, claims can be settled much, much quicker through improved claims processes (i.e. the use of embedded technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing (NLP)).

We can report that Cover Genius’ technology services have not been affected by the outage. While some of our partners may have been affected by the outage, access to their customers’ policies has not."