A major cyber outage has hit businesses across the world, and it's disrupting air travel across the globe, including at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
By 7:20 a.m., more than 90 flights in and out of the Twin Cities had already been called off, and the number was likely to grow, said airport spokesman Jeff Lea.
"Just like with winter storms, if flights are canceled in other parts of the country, they don't make it here," he said. "We could see the domino effect."
Lines at check-in counters and security checkpoints were already long in Terminal 1, Lea said. He advised travelers to communicate directly with their airline about their flight status as information displayed on airport flight monitors is "unreliable."
Hometown airline Sun Country has canceled all flights scheduled to depart before 7 a.m., The airline said it is starting to resume some flights "but anticipates additional disruption to continue Friday morning." Travelers should check their emails for updates, the airline said.
Delta Air Lines, the dominant carrier at MSP, said it resumed some departures after halting all flights earlier Friday. The airline had canceled 319 flights nationwide due to the outage, including 50 at MSP.
More than 1,000 flights at airports across the country had been called off, according to the flight tracking website flightaware.com. More than 1,700 worldwide were canceled and more than 19,000 flights delayed, the website said.
"Multiple airlines are reporting system outages that are impacting flights at MSP and nationwide. Please check with your airline for the latest flight status before leaving for the airport," MSP said in a statement on X.
United and American said they also were impacted by the outage, but were slowly resuming operations. Lea said some flights operating as normal at MSP, but that it is an airline-by-airline situation.
"As we work to fully restore these systems, some flights are resuming. Many customers traveling today may experience delays," United said in a statement.
The Federal Aviation Administration ( FAA) said it is "closely monitoring" the cyber outage
"The FAA is closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines. Several airlines have requested FAA assistance with ground stops until the issue is resolved," the agency wrote in a post on social media.
The mass outages appear to be related to a software update by the company CrowdStrike, a cyber security firm.
" CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," the company's CEO George Kurtz posted on X. "This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."
The outage impacted other industries, too. WCCO posted early Friday that its broadcast was delayed due to the tech issues.
"The Microsoft outage is delaying the broadcast of WCCO This Morning. We're working to rectify the issue and go live on the air ASAP," the network said shortly after 5 a.m.
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