Travelers stranded overnight at SLC airport by global tech outage

More than 100 flights were either delayed or canceled at Salt Lake City International Airport early Friday due to an information technology outage that affected several airlines.

The outage was caused by an issue with Crowdstrike, a tech company that provides cybersecurity services to organizations worldwide. The company issued a “faulty update” to computers running Microsoft Windows, according to the Associated Press.

The problem left hundreds of red-eye passengers stranded at the Salt Lake City airport until the airlines’ check-in systems were up and running again at about 8 a.m, airport spokesperson Nancy Volmer said. Volmer didn’t have a specific estimate for what time the outage began.

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“At this point, things are back online, the flights are able to take off again, but it’s just catching up with those passengers and the flights that they were not able to have take off this morning,” Volmer said. She added that 67 flights were delayed and 45 were canceled.

While employees scrambled for answers, passengers at the airport were told they could either go home or find lodging elsewhere and attempt to bill their airlines later. At one point, wait times for Delta Air Lines customer service were over 3 hours long, and those who did make it to the service desk said they didn’t receive any update.

Around 3 a.m., free pizza was being distributed. Twenty minutes later, Delta offered pillows and blankets, all of which were grabbed up in half an hour. One traveler grumbled, “not what I was hoping for.”

Matt Leavitt and Dewey Bohrer met at the airport while trying to get back to California. They’d already boarded their flight and sat on it for hours, they said, before being asked to deplane.

“This is what you call foxhole friendship,” said Bohrer, a U.S. Air Force veteran flying home from a veterans’ reunion.

Leavitt was traveling home from a business trip and has gotten a few hours of sleep at a time in airport terminals over the past few days, he said. He woke up in the Atlanta airport early Thursday morning after spending another night on the ground.

“Deja vu, this was me last night,” he said as he stretched across the floor of gate A14 to sleep.

Leavitt and Bohrer said until systems were back online, the airport seemed like the best place to be. It had food, water and restrooms — and the blue glow of TV monitors displaying error messages.

“Thanks everyone for their patience,” Volmer said. “Make sure that if there’s anyone who has a flight plan today, or over the weekend, just to check with their airline to make sure that their flight is still on time and hasn’t been impacted by this IT issue.”

The New York Times reported that flights were disrupted at several U.S. airports Friday morning, and that more would likely to be delayed or canceled through the day, as a cascading effect would mean crews might need to be reassigned.

Airports around the world experienced similar delays, The Times reported. In Sydney, Australia, passengers endured long lines as information screens went blank, and programming at the national broadcaster was disrupted. Airports in Great Britain, Germany and Taiwan had long delays at check-ins, and flights were delayed or canceled. At one airport in South Korea, handwritten boarding passes were being slowly handed out.

The Times also reported that a few hospitals in Germany were canceling elective procedures, and doctors in Britain’s National Health Service could not access systems.

In Utah, a spokesperson for Intermountain Health, the state’s largest hospital system, said there was “no direct impact to scheduling or patient care” from the global outage. A spokesperson for University of Utah Health said the provider doesn’t use Crowdstrike, “so business is proceeding as normal with no major impacts.”

Tribune business editor Sean P. Means contributed to this report.

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