American Airlines and United Airlines are resuming flights having been forced to temporarily halt operations as part of the wide-ranging global impact of an IT outage impacting computer systems today.
The Federal Aviation Administration had earlier said the two US majors and Delta Air Lines had stopped the departure of aircraft for flights “regardless of destination” due to “communications issues” .
It comes as cyber-security firm CrowdStrike confirmed it has identified an issue and deployed a fix for a defect found in a content update for Microsoft Windows systems.
In a fresh company update American Airlines says: ”Earlier this morning, a technical issue with a vendor impacted multiple carriers, including American. As of 5:00 a.m. ET, we have been able to safely re-establish our operation.”
Star Alliance carrier United meanwhile says that “some flights are resuming” as it works to fully restore these systems. However it add adds: ”Many customers travelling today may experience delays.”
A string of airlines and airports around the globe have been impacted to some extent or another by the outage. In Europe, KLM has been heavily impacted.
”KLM and other airlines and airports have been affected by a global computer outage, making flight handling impossible,” the Dutch carrier says. ”We’re working hard to resolve the problem. Until then, we will have to largely suspend operations.”
Even those carriers not directly impacted by the outage, are still braced for some disruption resulting from the knock-on effect on the global air transport system.
”Finnair is not using that technology stack or platform in our own flight operations,” said the airline’s chief executive Turkka Kuusisto, speaking during a second quarter results call today. ”But when we are flying a towards destinations and airports where that technology is in use that obviously influences our flights as well.
”We are continuously monitoring the situation – potentially delays in flights and in the worst case terminating some flights.”
Aviation analytics specialist Cirium estimates that so far 1,396 flights have been cancelled globally. There were more than 110,000 commercial flights scheduled today.
