US airlines are working to get their operations back into gear after a global computer outage forced some carriers to halt all departures overnight.
Thousands of flights operated by US carriers are now in the skies, indicating that the impact of the global IT outage, while massive, has not forced airlines to cancel anywhere near all their flights on 19 July.
As of 09:45 US eastern time, several major US carriers had scrubbed about 10% of their flights. Others appeared unaffected, including Southwest Airlines, which tells FlightGlobal, “No impact at Southwest”.
Major aerospace suppliers Spirit AeroSystems and RTX also report that their operations are unaffected by the outage, caused by a defect within a computer update from a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. The update caused computer systems globally using Microsoft Windows to crash.
Data provider Cirium says airlines had cancelled 1,017 flights from US destinations as of 08:00, or about 4.2% total scheduled flights.
Thousands of flights are now airborne.
Aircraft-tracking website Flightradar24.com shows that 829 domestic and international flights operated by American were airborne as of 10:07 eastern. Other affected carriers have seemingly been slower to reboot operations, with 348 United flights and 357 Delta flights now airborne, the website shows.
Delta has cancelled more flights on 19 July than any airline globally, nixing 477 flights as of 10:00, or 13% of its operation for the day, according to FlightAware.com. American has cancelled 307 flights (8%) and United has nixed 223 flights (7%).
Those numbers appear to be climbing and delays are substantial, with American, Delta and United having delayed 13-18% of their scheduled flights on 19 July.
“Delta has resumed some departures following an earlier vendor technology issue,” the Atlanta-based airline’s website says. Delta’s mobile app appeared inoperable the morning of 19 July. United’s website says, “We are resuming some flights but expect schedule disruptions to continue throughout Friday.”
As for discount US carriers, Frontier had cancelled 48 flights (6%) and Spirit had scrubbed just 21 flights (2%) as of 10:00.
Frontier’s operation was “impacted yesterday, but then systems began recovering last night”, the airline says. Allegiant Air’s website appears to be down, with reports of cancelled flights.
Not all airlines are impacted.
Alaska Airlines and Southwest have each cancelled just four flights so far on 19 July, and regional airline SkyWest has scrubbed only 15 flights, FlightAware.com shows.
Airlines around the world have faced disruption following the outage, even those not directly impacted. Cirium data shows that 3,343 flights have so far been cancelled, representing around 3% of all global flights scheduled for today.
