Airline communications back online; some Hawai‘i flights able to depart amid worldwide tech outage

Airline communications systems impacted by a global technology outage that began Thursday are back online.

The Hawai‘i Department of Transportation reports that some flights have been able to depart Hawai‘i airports while others were canceled or were rescheduled.

Travelers should check with their airline prior to going to the airport. Expect delays.

Three major airlines in particular, United, Delta and American, issued systemwide ground stops just before midnight Thursday after what has been called a massive computer, technology, information technology or internet outage, depending on the source, that affected airlines, airports, banks, media companies, health care organizations and several other industries around the globe.

Starbucks was also impacted, putting an even bigger damper on those stuck at airports or making their morning commutes, taking a gamble on if they’d work today or not.

Six flights at Kahului Airport on Maui, 6 flights at the Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport on the Big Island, 9 flights at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu and 2 flights at Lῑhu’e Airport on Kaua‘i were impacted overnight, affecting more than 5,000 travelers.

The state Transportation Department increased security and extended concessions to accommodate impacted passengers.

All previously scheduled runway construction projects were canceled for the night to ensure runways were available when the airlines were ready to resume operations.

Anyone who has a flight today should check with their airline for their flight status before going to the airport.

“I was at Safeway at about 9:30 p.m. and they said their system wasn’t working for an hour so far,” said Melissa M Taylor of Hilo in an early morning reply to a comment about the worldwide outage from just after 11 p.m. Thursday in a Big Island Facebook group. “I couldn’t pay with debit. They only excepted cash or credit. Something is going on. Weird that we still have internet.”
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“Stuck in Chicago for same reason,” added Natalie Joan Alcain of Kealakekua shortly before 2 a.m. in the same thread.

Kamuela Chander was trying to make the situation a little more lighthearted with his reply.

“Go ahead and affect my bank account all you want,” he wrote in his reply. “You’ll be disappointed.”

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, based in Austin, Texas, blamed what has been called the “largest IT outage in history” on a defective Microsoft Windows update.

“Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected,” said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in a post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Kurtz said he and his firm understand the gravity of the situation and “are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption” the outage has caused.

“We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” he wrote. “As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows hosts.”

For the latest information, Kurtz directed the public to visit the CrowdStrike website and his posts on LinkedIn and X.

The aviation sector was hit particularly hard because of its sensitivity to timings.

A closely coordinated schedule and the ability operated by air traffic control means just one delay of a few minutes can throw off flights for the rest of the day.

According to a report by Inc.com, reports of the problem began late Thursday evening when Microsoft users started seeing their computers crash and displaying “the blue screen of death” — which means a PC running a Windows operating system has encountered a critical problem.

Despite CrowdStrike finding the problem and deploying a fix, millions of users aaround the world remained unable to reboot their computers. Slowly but surely, through the night and early morning, more and more people on social media have been saying their PCs are again working.