SALT LAKE CITY — Brook Carlisle woke up this morning to chaos.
“I've definitely experienced flight delays or cancellations, but I've never been a part of something that is this widespread,” she said. “They just started getting canceled one by one.”
Carlisle was supposed to be on a flight back to Utah from Denver early this afternoon.
“I've been rebooked on a 5:20 a.m. flight tomorrow morning,” she said. “I'm nervous that I'm going to get to the airport at, you know, four o'clock in the morning, and spend a significant portion of my day there.”
Ming Xi Liu, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Utah, was shocked to see how widespread the outage is, he said.
“I have never experienced such an IT outage affecting the global businesses, including the health care facilities, airport, airlines businesses, and also the banks,” said Liu. “This was unbelievable.”
We will likely see more of these mistakes in the future, said Pete Ashdown, President of Xmission.
“It's a big one, one of the biggest I've seen in the last few years,” he said. “It's not just a matter of saying, ‘Well, we're going to use mac,’ or, ‘We're going to use Linux because Microsoft has these problems.’” Mac and Linux potentially can have these problems as well. I would say, have manual processes that are outside of computers that in case there is a complete disaster where all the computers go down, you can still operate at some level.”
Even though CrowdStrike has rolled out a fix, Utah businesses could struggle to get their systems up and running again, said Liu.
“The current fix for this issue will take several days because there is no remote solution to that,” he said. “You have to rely on the IT professionals to do computer by computer, and many of the small businesses, they outsource their IT solutions to some individual companies, and just imagine how busy those IT companies will be in order to fix this issue.”
If you were affected by airline technology issues, you can visit flightrights.gov to see what you’re entitled to, like meals, hotels or free rebooking.
