Flight Delays, Cancellations In Chicago Amid Global Tech Outage

CHICAGO, IL — A global technology outage grounded flights and impacted banks and hospitals systems Friday morning, including impacting travel in and out of Chicago.

According to NBC Chicago, the FAA said United, American, Delta and Allegiant airlines were all grounded Friday morning due to the outage. However, American said as of 4 a.m. Central, it was able to safely re-establish operations.

In Chicago, FlightAware was reporting more than 150 total delays and nearly 90 flight cancellations at O'Hare. At Midway, there were 71 total delays and 4 flight cancellations as of just after 7:30 a.m.

The outage was caused more than 2,200 totals on flights within, into or out of the United States Friday morning and more than 1,100 flight cancellations within, into or out of the U.S., according to FlightAware.

Early Friday morning, Chicago-based United Airlines posted about the "third-party outage" on X, formerly Twitter, notifying travelers that they may experience delays. "We have issued a waiver to make it easier to change your travel plans at http://United.com or the United app," the company said.

Delta also said it had resumed some flight departures by 7 a.m.

The Chicago Sun-Times, however, reported the outage was causing "chaos" at O'Hare on Friday, with some travelers arriving to find the dreaded "blue screen of death" instead of arrivals and departures.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the incident was not caused by a cyberattack or security issue or security incident. Company CEO George Kurtz posted on X that "CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack."

Kurtz added that the problem has been identified, and a fix was being deployed.