Friday’s IT outage caused 9,650 flight cancellations across the world’s largest airlines

Last Friday’s major IT outage led to 9,650 flights being cancelled across the world's major airlines, as the aviation sector was put at a standstill.

The outage, which commenced early on Friday morning, came after a defected update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to many Microsoft machines to go offline. While Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted, the firm’s President and CEO George Kurtz clarified that it was not a security incident or cyberattack.

While the issue was resolved on the same day, the outage continued to wreak havoc on global airports and airlines throughout the rest of the weekend, leading to significant delays and cancellations.

New figures from aviation data company OAG highlighted that from Friday to Sunday, there were 9,650 cancellations from the world’s largest 20 airlines.

The most affected airlines were based in North America, with Delta Air Lines having a staggering 4,675 flights cancelled, while United Airlines and American Airlines had 1,706 and 860 cancelled, respectively.

For European airlines, EasyJet was the one that suffered the most, having 469 cancellations. This was spread over 136 on Friday, 103 on Saturday, and 230 on Sunday.

This was closely followed by German flag carrier Lufthansa, which had 281 cancellations in total. On Friday, it had 92 cancellations, while on Saturday and Sunday it had 83 and 106, respectively.

Contrary to the aforementioned two European airlines, Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair was primarily impacted on Friday, the day of the outage. It had 271 cancellations in total, 190 of which came on Friday.

In Asia, China Eastern and Indigo had the most cancellations with 186 and 182, respectively.

According to data, Turkish Airlines, a key airline for Maltese travellers seeking connections to a number of non-European countries, had 86 cancellations as result of the outage, all coming on Friday.

The data indicates that while the outage was resolved, such issues have prolonged effects on airlines, with many struggling to return to their normal operating levels.

In EasyJet’s case for example, the increase in cancellations was a combination of crew duty hours and aircraft resources, which continued to impact the business, OAG stated. With over 12 per cent of total flights cancelled on Sunday, EasyJet is still facing issues with getting back to normal operations.

In terms of airports, OAG stated that Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, had almost 11 per cent of its scheduled flights cancelled on Friday, yet quickly recovered to a more normal 1.4 per cent by Sunday.

Frankfurt Airport and Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport had highs of 3.8 per cent and 4.9 per cent on Friday, respectively. However, they also recovered, with the percentage of cancellations going down to just above two per cent by Sunday.

Locally, Malta International Airport on Friday morning released a statement saying that “delays are expected” as a result of network disruptions affecting multiple airlines.

“Please be assured that we are working diligently to manage the situation with minimal disruption,” MIA said, before advising travellers to check the status of their flight through its flight schedule. OAG data for MIA is not available.

OAG Chief Analyst John Grant said that the impact of the CrowdStrike IT outage “will linger on for a few more days yet, and will stay in the minds of travellers with cancelled holidays for even longer.”

“Such events highlight the challenges of an industry dependent on external IT systems that can, and likely will, fail again in the future. Faced with Friday’s failures, airlines had no choice but to cancel flights and every airline wants to recover as quickly as they can,” he added.