Microsoft global IT outage: Dozens more flights cancelled as recovery tool released

On Friday, tech outages swept the world from hospitals and airlines, to banks and courts. Flights were grounded, payments delayed and hospitals across the world reported problems.

Crowdstrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, later issued a statement reassuring customers that the outage was not “a security incident or cyber attack.”

A flawed update rolled out by CrowdStrike, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity providers, knocked many offline around the world on Friday, causing flight and train cancellations and crippling some healthcare systems.

Here is a closer look at what we know about the incident:

Your flight is cancelled, overbooked or delayed: what, if anything, does the airline owe you?

The rules are tangled and depend on where your flight begins and the airline involved. Sometimes you may be entitled to a hotel room, all meals and hundreds of pounds in cash; in other circumstances you may just have to put a dismal aviation episode down to expensive experience, and see if your travel insurer can help.

To complicate matters further, some airlines do not have a great record about telling passengers about their rights or delivering the stipulated care and cash.

Travel Correspondent Simon Calder’s guide should make you aware of your entitlements, even if the airline fails to do so:

He writes: “For outbound British travellers, summer is a marvellous opportunity to trespass gleefully in someone else’s city.

“Whether you are in Manchester, Milan or Montreal, July and August are special times. These are densely populated, hard-working business cities. But come summer, many of the locals leave town and create a vacuum that tourists can fill with ease.

“Life for visitors, as well as residents who have stayed behind, spills out into the streets and squares, with picnics the common denominator. For all the passing travellers, the city feels spacious.

“Yet perhaps the summer city break has had its day. This year aviation chaos has been a regular weekend feature.”

On Sunday easyJet has grounded flights to Milan, Rome and Hamburg, while British Airways has axed departures to Barcelona and Geneva.

“Many of us try to squeeze a short break between Friday and Sunday. Who wants to have their travel dream taken away as you queue at the gate at Heathrow or Gatwick, or being forced to find workarounds if the planned flight home vanishes?

“A summer break should be the epitome of anticipation: deliciously awaiting the chance to revel in urban bliss. But an unholy trinity of air-traffic control staff shortage, summer storms and IT failures potentially stand between you and metropolitan indulgence.

“Recent events undermine confidence; apprehension is not an emotion that sits easily with travel.”

The scale of the cancellations afflicting airline passengers to, from and within the UK as a result of the CloudStrike IT failure is becoming clearer, with final figures for Friday and Saturday now available.

The aviation analytics firm, Cirium, says 408 arrivals and departures at UK airport were cancelled on Friday 19 July. This was on a day that was expected to be the busiest for UK aviation since 2019 – but the cancellations meant it fell well short.

While many airlines and airports said they hoped to be back to normal on Saturday, a further 119 flights were cancelled.

As of 10.30am on Sunday, Cirium calculate a further 88 flights to, from or within the UK had been cancelled, taking the total over the peak weekend of the year so far to over 600 grounded flights. It is likely that at least 100,000 passengers have had their flight axed.

Worldwide, almost 12,000 flights have been cancelled since Friday.

Many passengers are taking to social media to complain. Scammers, though to be based in East Africa, have set up dozens of “imposter accounts” on X/Twitter that pretend to be official airline and holiday company representatives.

They respond to the frustrated traveller and ask for a phone number so they can arrange compensation.

Anyone who provides one will then be called on WhatsApp and persuaded to download a legitimate remittance app and link it to their bank account. The scammer then assures the customer they will be sent money, while in fact they are tricked into sending money to an unknown recipient.

This afternoon the number of easyJet cancellations to/from Gatwick has doubled, from 24 to 48. New fallers include two Amsterdam flights, Geneva, Toulouse, Marseille and Naples.

Previously announced: grounded flights to/from Palma, Faro and Pisa.

Aer Lingus has axed 2 Heathrow-Dublin round-trips.

When a flight is cancelled, the airline must provide the passenger with a replacement as soon as possible – including on a rival airline if need be. It must also book a hotel room and provide meals if necessary.

But many passengers have told The Independent that their airline has said only its own flights can be used.

Europe’s biggest travel firm, Tui, is cancelling more peak-season package holidays as it struggles to recover from the CrowdStrike chaos.

The firm’s crew rostering system was impacted by Friday’s IT outage. Tui grounded 64 holiday flights to and from the UK on Friday, with further delays and cancellations on Saturday and Sunday.

The company is taking the highly unusual step of cancelling entire package holidays to manage down the scale of its problems – which are particularly acute at Manchester airport.

Travel Correspondent Simon Calder reports:

Microsoft has released a recovery tool to help repair Windows machines hit by the glitch after the company disclosed that 8.5 million devices were affected.

The tool is designed to aid in quickly recovering impacted machines via a bootable USB drive.