Airlines Scribbling Flight Times on Whiteboards After Catastrophic Glitch Bricks Computers Worldwide

Problems at airports are still lingering...

Brick City

Staff at airports from Singapore to Northern Ireland were forced to scribble flight times on whiteboards due to a global computer outage that started Thursday evening and lingered into Friday, Business Insider reports, due to a glitch with Microsoft and Crowdstrike's online services.

One woman posted a picture from her brother-in-law on the social media platform X-formerly-Twitter, showing how the staff at Belfast International Airport had to write down flight departures by hand, with erasable markers.

Expect Delays

While many airports' IT systems are back online late Friday morning, The Washington Post reports that the outage is still having an impact, with many travelers stranded in airports due to canceled and delayed flights.

Friday morning saw more than 2,100 airport flights canceled across the world, according to WaPo, with more than half in the United States. In addition, more than 22,000 flights were also delayed globally.

Besides airports, emergency call services were interrupted while medical staff at hospitals couldn't perform procedures, according to WaPo. The Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City said some of its computerized display information for riders was down as well.

Future Problems

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike said it had inadvertently inserted an error into an update for Microsoft's online platforms, WaPo reports, sparking this worldwide blackout — or "blueout," since it manifested as the tell-tale Microsoft "blue screen of death."

Though there's a fix for the issue, according to WaPo, problems with many computers and online systems still persist.

When the dust settles from this global IT outage, various sectors will need to ask themselves how much money they lost due to this outage and perhaps how to prevent one in the future.

And as the world becomes ever more connected — and we increasingly rely on a handful of big tech companies like Microsoft and CrowdStrike — these are questions we need to confront before the next catastrophe.

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