A San Francisco International Airport employee tries to help an upset traveler Friday. Hundreds of travelers were delayed and stranded due to a technical outage.
Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
Peter Smith, center, his wife, Thu Smith, and children, Charlie, 2, and baby Audrey, try to rebook a flight after being stranded at San Francisco International Airport due to a technical issue Friday. Hundreds of travelers were delayed and stranded due to a technical outage.
Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
Kody Day sits on the floor as he waits in a long line to rebook his canceled flight at SFO.
Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
Harry Taylor falls asleep as he waits in line to rebook his canceled flight at SFO.
Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
Dozens of travelers wait to rebook their flights at SFO.
Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
The Bay Area woke up Friday morning to a global tech outage that brought airports, businesses and government services around the world to a standstill. The outage has been attributed to CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company whose software is used to protect millions of computers and networks. An apparently faulty software update caused scores of computers to crash.
Airports saw massive disruptions after several airlines were forced to ground flights during the outage. The disruption had cascading effects as the day unfolded, as flight delays and cancelations forced airlines to scramble to reassign flight crews.
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At San Francisco International Airport, the outage appeared to hit United Airlines particularly hard. No United flights left SFO for several hours Friday.
Long lines snaked around the United terminal at SFO with passengers trying to rebook new flights. Many in the rebooking line worked their phones frantically, calling friends or family to tell them about the change of plans, or trying to book flights on a different airline. SFO employees in bright-yellow vests walked around trying to make sure people were in the right spot.
More than 130 flights at SFO have been canceled, according to FlightAware, and more than 400 flights have been delayed. FlightAware data showed that United had the most canceled flights at SFO, with more than 70 total scuttled trips.
Some machines at SFO displayed the same “blue screens of death” seen at computer terminals across the world.
A “blue screen of death” at the United Terminal in San Francisco International Airport on Friday.
Danielle Echeverria/The Chronicle
SFO said on social media just after 7 a.m. that the airport’s computer systems “are functioning and airline systems are coming back online. Contact your airline directly for flight status updates.”
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Jeanine Benca and her 6-year-old son were attempting to take a United red-eye flight home to Pennsylvania from SFO when the software glitch upended their plans. After waiting for an hour on the plane after boarding, she and the other passengers were asked to return to the airport. She and her son “ended up spending the night at SFO because United wouldn’t just cancel the flight and was/is holding the checked luggage hostage,” Benca said in a text message to the Chronicle. The flight was later canceled, “but there’s no sign of the baggage.”
Airport personnel, clustering in small groups to create a game plan to help the hundreds of stranded passengers, discussed their boss’ simple instruction: “Be helpful.” At 9:30 a.m., airport personnel were handing out water bottles to people waiting in line.
Shauntelle and John Anderson were taking their daughter and son-in-law, Odessa and Josh Ostler, on a dream trip they had been planning for more than a year: The family, from near Salt Lake City, was flying to Sydney to get on a 15-day Australian cruise.
They flew from Salt Lake City to San Francisco last night for their connecting flight to Australia. But when they got on the plane at 11 p.m., things began to get strange, Shauntelle Anderson explained.
“At first, they said it was a computer problem, and it would only be a few minutes for them to figure it out,” she said. But then, half an hour later, they said they were still working on it.
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An hour and a half after that, they told people they could get off the plane “just to walk around,” she said. “But they said you didn’t have to.” Finally, around 2:30 a.m., they told all passengers they had to get off the flight and take their bags with them.
So the family camped out for a while in the airport with all of the other passengers kicked off their flights. But sometime in the early hours of the morning, flight attendants made everyone go back outside of security, where they said more agents would be able to help them rebook.
At 8 a.m. Friday, the family was still waiting in line with hundreds of other people trying to rebook. Josh was trying to book new flights on his phone, while Odessa was trying to get in touch with United.
The family members are not hopeful they’re going to make the cruise, which leaves Sunday Australian time, and the cruise line has already told them it will not refund them or let them on at another stop. By 10 a.m., they were still in line.
“We’re out about $15,000 now,” Shauntelle said.
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Just outside of a United security checkpoint, a group of about a dozen teenagers laid on their luggage, having just finished hiking in Yosemite during a camping trip.
The group members were all supposed to be on their various flights home Friday — and some of weren’t sure they’d make it.
Brian Bares, who had been touring California colleges with his oldest son, was picking up with his other son from the camp and before flying home to Austin. He said he stayed at the Embassy Suites near the airport overnight, and the lack of activity tipped him off that something was wrong.
“Normally, there’s flights going in and out all the time, and you hear it,” he said. “But last night there was nothing.”
The Bares’ flight wasn’t until 2 p.m. Friday, and he was hopeful they would still make it. He said the plane that would be taking them had taken off from its original destination, so he took that as a good sign.
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Stranded travelers crowd Terminal 3 at SFO.
Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle
“I just hope we make it to Austin sometime this afternoon,” he said.
Across the bay, travel at San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport did not appear to suffer any meaningful setbacks as a result of the outage, a spokesperson for the airport said. Flights moving in and out of the airport hewed closely to scheduled departure and arrival times. As of 6 a.m. PST, the airport reported 19 delays and two cancellations. San Jose International Airport has seen 19 delays and three cancellations, according to FlightAware.
Officials with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said that, across the state, “all 911, public safety communications and critical infrastructure” was functioning as expected. But anyone trying to make reservations for state park facilities faced an 8-hour outage, according to California State Parks, although that outage occurred from midnight to 8 a.m.
Throughout the Bay Area, critical computer systems that form the backbone of emergency-response operations and other municipal functions went largely unaffected by the outage.
A spokesperson for the San Francisco Fire Department said that the botched software upgrade was probably the cause of around 20 building alarms blaring simultaneously throughout the city. After an investigation, officials “concluded that it was mostly likely to do the Microsoft computer glitch,” the spokesperson said. None of the alarms was caused by an actual fire, the spokesperson said.
San Francisco’s emergency management department said in a statement that the majority of the city’s IT systems don’t use the software involved in the CrowdStrike issue, though “some issues were reported and are currently being assessed.” Officials did not immediately elaborate on what systems were affected. The city’s 911 system was not apparently affected.
Hospital systems across the Bay Area reported some technical issues, though there were no immediate reports that the botched upgrade affected patients. UCSF, Sutter Health, San Francisco General Hospital and Laguna Honda Hospital were not impacted, officials for those hospital said. John Muir Health Walnut Creek Medical Center had to contend with problems with some of its administrative software, the hospital said.
A spokesperson for Kaiser Permanente said some branches of the health care system were forced to activate backup systems “to support both continuous patient care and to secure access to medical records. All Kaiser Permanente hospitals and medical offices remain open for care and service, and we are continuing to monitor our operations as we work to restore all affected systems,” the spokesperson said.
Oakland officials said the brunt of the outage’s impact fell on employee computers. The city said in a statement that 911 lines remained open throughout the outage, and public safety computer systems had mostly restored by Friday afternoon. The city did not specify what public safety computers it referred to, but said that both the police and fire departments were nearing full operations. It’s unclear how the two agencies were affected.
The Oakland Public Library system posted to social media that its systems were hobbled and that digital services would be restored “on a rolling basis” throughout the day Friday.
A spokesperson for BART said trains were “operating as scheduled” Friday morning.
Officials with Alameda County Superior Court released a statement saying the outage was affecting the court’s digital case management systems, which were operating under “limited capabilities.” The court remained open, however, and anyone with scheduled court appearances was still required to appear.
The outage forced the U.S. Social Security system to close local offices, though the agency said in a post online that its phone lines and some internet services were still available.
Overnight and earlier in the day, long lines formed at airports in the U.S., Europe and Asia as airlines lost access to check-in and booking services.
United Airlines issued a statement on social media saying it was working to restore its technology systems as of around 3:30 a.m. PST. American Airlines said it was able to “safely re-establish our operation” around 2 a.m. Spirit Airlines said on social media around 5:20 a.m. that it was “unable to rebook guests whose travel plans have been disrupted” until its systems were restored.
Major domestic airlines have issued waivers for travelers impacted by the outage that would allow them to rebook their flights. Air travelers whose flights are canceled are also entitled to compensation, but new federal rules setting standards on these refunds have yet to go into effect.
“The FAA is closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines,” the FAA wrote on social media. More than 1,100 flights have been canceled worldwide and more than 1,700 delays were reported as of 5 a.m., according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.
The issue appeared to arise after CrowdStrike issued an update to its software on computers that use Windows operating systems. Computers that use other operating systems, such as Mac and Linux, were not affected, according to the company’s CEO, George Kurtz.
CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We…
— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 19, 2024
Kurtz wrote on social media that the company was “actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” adding that the problem was not linked to a “security incident or cyberattack.”
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz wrote.
CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity firm that sells real-time threat monitoring and detection services through their Falcon Sensor program, said professor Ahmed Banafa at San Jose State University, who teaches courses on computer networking, operating systems and cybersecurity.
That program continually scans the devices it is installed on — from ATMs to computers to phones — for viruses, hacking, ransomware and other intrusions, he said. Unlike previous generations of software, it runs on a cloud server and takes up very little computing power on the devices it protects.
Microsoft does not own CrowdStrike, which is a publicly traded company of its own. But Microsoft’s cloud service, Microsoft 365, which includes its Microsoft Office products, uses Falcon Sensor as its digital shield. CrowdStrike continually updates that shield with new features. So when a bug in the latest Microsoft update went worldwide, it knocked out computers at everything from airports to hospitals, Banafa said.
Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact” and that it was “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
Elizabeth Wilson contributed to this report.
Reach Dominic Fracassa: [email protected]. Reach Danielle Echeverria: [email protected]; Twitter: @DanielleEchev. Reach Chase DiFeliciantonio: [email protected]; Twitter: @ChaseDiFelice. Reach Sarah Ravani: [email protected]; Twitter: @SarRavani. Reach Catherine Ho: [email protected]
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