Traveling today? Here's how airport delays and 911 outages triggered by 'CrowdStrike' bug and Microsoft downtime can affect you

What you need to know

• One of the biggest IT outages in history occurred this morning and is still underway.
• Many flights are grounded due to the outage and 911 services and banks are affected.
• A CrowdStrike kernel driver appears to be the main cause of the CrowdStrike outage, making mitigating the issue complicated and difficult.
• CrowdStrike has identified the issue, isolated it, and deployed a fix, though affected systems need to be online for that fix to take effect.
• It has been confirmed by CrowdStrike that the situation is not a cyberattack or security incident.

Windows device around the world are down right now, showing the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). The Microsoft outage centers around a faulty driver deployed by CrowdStrike. The bug has caused planes to be grounded, banks to run into issues, and even affected 911 emergency services. It is the one of the largest IT outages in history, and its effects will be widespread.

The CrowdStrike outage led to a massive spike in outages and issues on service issue tracker Downdetector. 

How will the Microsoft / CrowdStrike outage affect travelling?

If you are travelling today, you should expect severe delays. Information boards in airports cannot show details (or anything but the BSOD) until the bug is fixed. Several airlines have advised customers to arrive early to give more time to the airlines. EasyJet, an airline in the UK, said customers should arrive three hours early because the airline has to use pen and paper to process people.

We're checking for updates from airlines regularly, but you should expect that other airlines will have to adjust operations to deal with the issue. Considering the global scale of the CrowdStrike outage, millions of people could be affected.

Since a fix for the issue has been deployed, some affected services are already back online, but the situation is expected to continue as devices receive proper fixes. 

One customer shared a hand-written boarding pass that was required in India due to the outage. Videos of JFK airport show the chaos caused by the outage.

With the issue affecting airports around the world, delays will likely continue even after the bug is fixed. So many people go through airports each day that delays cause backups that can take hours to ease.

911 services down

The internet outage has also caused 911 services to be unavailable in several areas. The entire state of Alaska is said to not have 911 services right now. Non-emergency call centers are also affected, according to the Alaska State Troopers on Facebook. There are direct numbers that people can call, but many will not know those numbers off the top of their head.

911 outage reports spiked on Downdetector and then dropped to lower rates, but it still appears many are affected by the outage.