Tech Outage Affects MI Flights, Hospitals, Border Crossings

METRO DETROIT — A global communications outage grounded flights, slowed down traffic on Detroit's border crossings and affected some Detroit area hospitals Friday morning.

More than 100 flights were canceled at Detroit Metro Airport and another 100 more were delayed Friday morning due to the technology outage, according to flightaware.

Officials warned anyone flying to first check the status of their flight.

Delta Airlines released a statement Friday morning just before 8 a.m. that it had resumed some flight departures, though it was immediately unclear if any of those flights had taken off from Detroit Metro Airport.

Most of the flights canceled or delayed at the airport Friday morning were Delta flights.

There were also backups and delays at the Ambassador Bridge and Detroit-Windsor Tunnel border crossings Friday morning because of the technology outage. Officials asked drivers to avoid the areas.

The outage is also affecting some Corewell Health systems. Officials said its hospitals and emergency rooms are open, though some procedures and appointments might be delayed because of the technology outage.

The American cybersecurity technology company Crowdstrike does not believe the global outage was due to a cyberattack, but rather a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website," President and CEO of Crowdstrike George Kurtz said on social media.