PORTLAND, Maine — A number of major airlines in the U.S. and around the globe were grounded for several hours because of a major technology outage affecting Windows-based systems, leaving millions of travelers stranded.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a warning around 1:45 a.m. Friday to say that flights in the U.S. with United, American, Delta, and Allegiant had all been grounded by the outage, though the airlines began to report later in the morning that services were starting to resume.
Maine's two largest airports, Portland International Jetport and Bangor International Airport, said the outage caused numerous flight delays and cancellations.
"It looks like things are starting to sort itself out, things are coming back online," Bangor International Airport spokesperson Aimee Thibodeau said. "It's a little bit easier for us to pivot sometimes, but we're still seeing some cancellations and delays. It's going to take some time for all of this to work itself out."
For the latest Portland International Jetport flight information, click here.
For the latest Bangor International Airport flight information, click here.
NEWS CENTER Maine's Sam Rogers spoke with flight crews at the airport early Friday morning who said they didn't know what was going on and were learning from the airlines.
Rogers reported that several screens at the Jetport that use Microsoft networks were down, but the departure and arrival screens were working fine.
Later in the day other airlines such as Breeze Airways, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, and more noted they have resumed normal or partial operations, according to the Portland Jetport's website.
Then there were the unlucky travelers left to deal with severe delays after trying to depart from Maine early Friday morning.
"That's life. We can't do anything about it!" Bill Nickerson said, after learning his Friday flight to Florida was rescheduled. "With the rigmarole and whatever is happening, [the] best we can get is 6 o'clock Sunday morning."
Working to help get Maine businesses online is Uprise Partner Chief Technology Partner Brian Gagnon. He said while things have ironed out for most people, it may be until Saturday before everything is fully operational again.
"We've got customers in the health care space, and their whole system [and] patient management system ... they had to reschedule everything from surgeries to patient care," Gagnon said.
Escalating disruptions continued hours after Microsoft said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services.
The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, showed growing numbers of outages in services at Visa, ADT security, and Amazon, and airlines including American Airlines and Delta.
Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted on social media platform X that the company “is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
He said: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”