Global IT Outage Sparks Travel Chaos as 4,000+ Flights Canceled Worldwide
Photo Caption: A file image of Tampa International Airport, one of the U.S. gateways reporting disruption on Friday. Tampa International Airport
Skift Take
Computer problems are nothing new for airlines and airports, but the scale of Friday's outage is without recent parallel, with Delta and United among those badly hit.
Airlines around the world are attempting to recover from a catastrophic global IT outage. Companies in the United States, UK, India, and Australia are among those badly affected.
Earlier on Friday, Delta Air Lines “paused” all flights in its global network as it “worked through a vendor technology issue.” United Airlines was among the other big names to halt all departures, with problems "impacting [its] ability to access reservation tools" for rebooking passengers. The carrier has since restarted some services.
Elsewhere, Canada's Porter Airlines cancelled all departures until 12pm ET, and Eurowings scrapped all domestic German and UK services until 3pm CET.
As of 12pm ET (4pm GMT), aviation analytics firm Cirium said 4,295 flights had been canceled globally on Friday, with thousands more delayed. This number is expected to rise throughout the day.
KLM said on X on Friday morning that the cyber challenges had made "flight handling
