KENNER, La. — A global technology outage caused by a faulty software update that was implemented overnight knocked out millions of customers of Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and caused issues for people trying to check-in or book flights and in some cases use credit cards.
Many broadcasters were also hard-pressed to put on their newscasts. WWL Louisiana’s technology team spent the better part of the early morning restoring devices.
At Armstrong International, people showing up for early morning flights were greeted with long and slow-moving lines as the outage primarily affected check-in and booking systems.
At noon, WWL Louisiana reporter Alyssa Curtis said that while lines for afternoon flights were flowing fairly normally, a separate line catering to those who had cancelled flights and needed to re-book, was taking people an hour to traverse.
TSA said it was not impacted, so once customers had their bags checked and were checked in, they were more home free.
At least one customer said she had her Thursday flight to Milwaukee cancelled and was now facing yet another delay. A man said his two daughters had their flights home from Paris cancelled and they were having to sleep in the airport because hotels were booked solid due to the Olympics.
Others talked about hours of delays that could cause them issues making connecting flights.
The Louisiana Department of Motor Vehicles said it was having services slowly return but it suggested anyone with an appointment Friday try to re-book it for next week, if at all possible.
Most hospitals did not report major issues and only Plaquemines Parish government reported an issue but it said it was coming back online as well.