Nowadays, traveling is as fast and efficient as it ever was. Not only are there quite a few transportation methods to choose from, but generally speaking, traveling is widely accessible too, such as flying. But despite flying becoming more and more reliable, with hundreds or thousands of flights happening daily, some hiccups are bound to happen regardless.
Today’s story covers how a worldwide IT cybersecurity outage affected an airline and how a delayed flight was saved by a hero flight attendant. A person on Reddit shared their experience of traveling amidst a global technological crisis, and how their journey went.
More Info: Reddit
And just in case you're confused with the abbreviations in the story, FA stands for "Flight Attendant", FO means "First Officer" and DL stands for "Delta".
Traveling is exciting and fun until you encounter interruptions and delays
Image credits: Richard Gatley (not the actual photo)
A person approached Reddit to tell their traveling story amidst a global IT outage
Image credits: JESHOOTS.COM (not the actual photo)
The person was traveling back home via a couple of flights, and had already been waiting in the airport for 7 hours when their flight got delayed
Image credits: wavebreakmedia_micro (not the actual photo)
The Original Poster could hear the flight attendants and other airport staff arguing with each other, not knowing how to proceed next
Image credits: Chris Brignola (not the actual photo)
The gate agent didn't let the passengers board as the crew wasn't "properly" registered due to the IT outage
Image credits: gcijeff77
Finally, one of the flight attendants was fed up, made a call, and the passengers were suddenly onboarded, despite the airport staff's internal conflict
Recently, a person approached Reddit to share their experience with a delayed flight due to a worldwide IT outage and how their flight was unexpectedly saved by a “hero” crew. To understand the situation better, here’s a bit of context first if you haven’t heard the news about this just yet.
CrowdStrike, a global cybersecurity company, caused the biggest IT security failure in history. The company’s services are used across many industries, including critical infrastructure. This includes hospitals, airlines, and even emergency services such as 911.
Many public and private sector devices use Windows. CrowdStrike released a new update for their software to update security for Windows devices, and it caused a worldwide shutdown of all devices that had the software installed.
Specifically, it caused an error called BSOD or (Blue Screen Of Death), which caused the devices to reboot infinitely, essentially bricking them. As a result, airports started to malfunction, as well as emergency and medical services, and others.
Of course, this caused a global impact and CrowdStrike’s stock plummeted. In the midst of it, the Original Poster (OP) was in an airport, waiting for their flight. Many flights were canceled or delayed, even for days on end, so the airport staff was in distress. The OP expected Delta to delay the flight.
They were in between flights back home and had a flight scheduled for 10 PM. The OP had 7 hours to wait but decided to just sit it out. At 9 PM, the flight was already delayed to an 11 PM departure, but it didn’t take off then either.
Image credits: Quang Nguyen Vinh (not the actual photo)
The OP even heard the airport staff fighting, as the crew and flight attendants were arguing about how to proceed next for over 2 hours. It all went down even to the details such as, “One flight attendant isn’t wearing a uniform,” so then the FA looked to borrow a uniform.
Afterward, the gate agent said she couldn’t open the door to onboard, as the crew wasn’t properly registered in the system due to the IT outage. Finally, one of the flight attendants was fed up and mumbled, “This is not going to happen on my watch,” and made a call on her cellphone.
Suddenly, a ramp worker opened the airplane door and shouted that everyone should onboard, if they wanted to get to the specific location the plane was going to. The gate agent hung up on scheduling and announced at 3AM, “Get on the plane now. All rows, all zones, just get on the plane.” In the end, people onboarded the plane and took off.
The OP tried to be as abstract as possible in sharing their experience so as to not reprimand the crew who decided to make the flight happen anyway, despite the internal airport staff conflict. Additionally, Microsoft released a free tool to update and fix malfunctioning devices. Over 8.5 million devices were affected by CrowdStrike's update.
As of now, the outage has stabilized and the rapid reaction from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft helped industries to get back on track, but the damage was already done. Delta Air Lines is already being investigated by the US Department Of Transportation, as thousands of flights were canceled or delayed.
Have you ever experienced a similar delay? What's the longest you had to wait in an airport? Let us know in the comments below.
People online rooted for the "hero" flight attendant and shared similar experiences
