(NewsNation) — Thousands of flights continued to be delayed Monday following CrowdStrike’s failed software update Friday that grounded most airlines.
As of Monday morning, Flight Aware showed more than 2,500 delayed flights within, into, or out of the U.S. and nearly 900 canceled. The most affected airports were Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and the Charlotte Douglas International Airport.
Delta reported 626 cancellations, or nearly 83% of all canceled flights.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a message to customers Sunday that the airline continues to recover and restore operations after the outage. He said a pause in Delta’s operations resulted in more than 3,500 Delta and Delta Connection scrubbed flights. Delta has been offering waivers to affected customers.
“The technology issue occurred on the busiest travel weekend of the summer, with our booked loads exceeding 90%, limiting our re-accommodation capabilities,” Bastian wrote.
The issues began Friday morning after cybersecurity company CrowdStrike deployed a software update that contained an error that affected computers using Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Because CrowdStrike is one of the leading cybersecurity providers, the error had major impacts around the globe, grounding airlines and causing problems for banks, retailers, health care systems and 911 systems.
Although the company identified a fix, it requires manual, hands-on work to fix each individual computer, leaving companies with the task of handling thousands or millions of machines to get everything up and running. That’s caused lingering issues days after the error.
That’s what companies are struggling with now, said Gregory Falco, an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell University. The problems show how fragile an interconnected, global infrastructure can be. They also recall memories of Y2K, when there were fears that technology could collapse around the globe in 2000 due to an error in how dates were handled in software.
But what’s different now is “that these companies are even more entrenched,” Falco said. “We like to think that we have a lot of players available. But at the end of the day, the biggest companies use all the same stuff.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
