As a global technology outage rippled across Chicago Friday morning, the arrival and departure screens at bustling O’Hare International Airport were empty of flights.
Instead, the boards showed bright blue “Recovery” screens with the words “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly” printed underneath.
“You have to laugh,” said United passenger Mollie Jensen of Chicago, who was trying to rebook her flight to Las Vegas. “Otherwise, you’d just sit down in the middle of the concourse and cry. You just have to push through it until you find a solution.”
The outage sent shockwaves across Chicago airports, trains, banks, hospitals and radio stations. It left passengers at O’Hare scrambling to rebook their flights or get on standby lists for later departures, and forced cancellations and delays on Metra trains.
UChicago Medicine workstations malfunctioned. Radio stations were knocked off air. Fermilab, the west suburban U.S. Department of Energy particle physics lab, suspended regular operations at its Batavia location.
The issues were caused by a faulty software update and affected computers running Microsoft Windows, and were not due to a security incident or cyberattack, according to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which issued the update. The firm said a fix was on the way.
In the meantime, the technology outage disrupted companies and services around the world, and highlighted their dependence on just a handful of providers.
The magnitude of the global outage was staggering, with disrupted operations across a broad spectrum of industries, impacting everyone from customers to employees, many of whom faced the “blue screen of death” on their work computers this morning.
The problem is expected to be resolved within 24 to 36 hours, but the computer crash will likely reverberate for a long time at cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, software giant Microsoft and the businesses that depend on them, according to Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at investment firm Wedbush Securities.
“It’s the biggest global IT outage in history,” Ives said. “It’s a black-eye moment for CrowdStrike,as well as the broader industry.”
Ives said Microsoft will likely have to impose stricter controls for future updates, while businesses need to reexamine their own technology systems to minimize future disruptions.
Meanwhile, CrowdStrike became a household name Friday — and not in a good way — bringing with it repercussions for the firm and the cybersecurity industry that may include lawsuits from impacted businesses and customers, Ives said.
“The reality is more and more consumers and enterprises rely on, but also are vulnerable to, computer updates,” Ives said. “It shows how vulnerable globally we are with one bad update into a Microsoft ecosystem.”
Transportation challenges
At Chicago’s airports, delays and cancellations mounted Friday during the busy midsummer travel season, and as participants at the nearby Republican National Convention in Milwaukee sought to make their way home. The smaller Midway airport reported eight cancellations and 134 delays by midafternoon, as Southwest Airlines, which is dominant at the Southwest Side airport, said it was not directly affected by the outage.
At O’Hare, more than 200 flights had been canceled by 2:30 p.m. and nearly 630 were delayed, according to flight tracking firm FlightAware.
Though the outage hobbled air travel worldwide for hours, many travelers left their homes and hotels early Friday with promises of on-time flights.
“It wasn’t until we pulled up in front of the terminal that we got a notification saying the flight was canceled,” said Chicago resident Amber Gee, who was flyingto Turks and Caicos with her husband to celebrate his 43rd birthday. “If I had to rate my frustration on a scale of 1 to 10? It’s about an 11.”
Gee and her husband, Tony, were rebooked on a flight leaving Saturday, which offered little solace. The delay meant they would miss a special dinner they had arranged Friday night and the excursion they had planned for Saturday morning.
“It’s costing us a lot,” Tony Gee said. “But there’s no reimbursem*nt, no compensation. No one seems to care.”
The United terminal was filled with passengers telling similar stories to each other and piecing together what happened, essentially crowdsourcing CrowdStrike’s colossal failure. Strangers began sharing memes mocking Microsoft’s apparent part in the outage.
Orlando residents Marie and Angel Santos were desperate to find a solution for their family after Frontier Airlines canceled their early morning flight. They said no one was at the low-cost airline’s check-in counter when they arrived at the airport, so they stood in line at United to see if they could find a different flight home.
A United representative told them it would cost about $2,000 for four one-way tickets to fly the couple and their two children home. They passed on the price and began heading back to Terminal 5 in the hopes someone from Frontier could help them.
“It’s a mess,” Marie Santos said. “I don’t know how we’ll figure this out today.”
There was at least one family, however, that seemed to have some luck at the airport. The McTigue family, who had traveled from Fort Lauderdale for a family wedding, arrived at the airport to find their flight delayed only 30 minutes.
“Looks like we’re the fortunate ones,” Patrick McTigue said as he headed toward TSA screening with his wife, Allison, and their two daughters.
“Famous last words,” Allison replied.
A short time later, their flight was pushed back two hours.
The woes at O’Hare amounted to a fraction of the flights canceled globally. By 2:30 p.m. Friday, 2,382 flights had been canceled in the U.S. alone, marking 8.9% of all scheduled flights, according to data from aviation analytics company Cirium.
Chicago-based United Airlines, one of two main carriers at O’Hare, said it had resumed flights Friday morning after pausing all departures overnight. The software disruption affected systems the airline uses to calculate aircraft weight, check in customers, run call center phones, and others.
American Airlines, the other major carrier at O’Hare, said it was able to reestablish operations by 4 a.m. Central Daylight Time. But the airline still expected delays and cancellations Friday.
The outage also affected commuters traveling around the Chicago area Friday morning. It hit Metra’s three Union Pacific lines — Union Pacific North, West and Northwest — leading to a handful of cancellations on the Union Pacific Northwest Line and delays on the others, and residual effects on some non-Union Pacific lines. The challenges Friday capped a difficult week of weather- and technology-related delays and cancellations for Metra.
The Ventra transit payment system used by CTA was also hit overnight, limiting customers who tried to add value to their farecards via the app or Ventra machines. The issue had been resolved by 8 a.m., CTA said.
Health care systems restored
Other businesses and hospitals across the area were also disrupted.At UChicago Medicine, hundreds of computer systems and servers, particularly those operating Windows, disconnected overnight, according to a notification sent to staff. Malfunctioning workstations often showed a blue error screen, the notification said.
Most “critical clinical and operational systems” were back online by 8 a.m. Friday, with additional connections expected to be restored throughout the day.
Some computer systems at Rush Medical Center also shut down overnight, a spokesperson said, but the hospital’s information services department restored all “critical clinical systems.”
“Patient impact has been minimal,” said spokesperson Tobin Klinger.
Northwestern Medicine and Cook County Health weren’t affected, officials said.
There was “minimal disruption” to Walgreens’ operations, with stores remaining open and able to serve patients and customers, a company spokesperson said. CVS stores and pharmacies are also operating normally.
Banks, radio and Starbucks disrupted
The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, which harnesses massive computing power to conduct particle physics research, was shut down by the outage early Friday.
Employees are working remotely while systems are being restored at the facility, which is funded by the Department of Energy.
“Due to the Microsoft Windows operating systems being impacted by a software update issued by CrowdStrike, many of the lab’s computer systems were impacted,” a DOE spokesperson said. “We are currently focusing on getting computer systems up and running. Laboratory employees were asked to work remotely today.”
Argonne National Laboratory in southwest suburban Lemont, a Department of Energy research operation that focuses in part on supercomputing, was also affected by the Windows outage.
The lab’s 3,500 employees are being asked to work remotely Friday due to issues with logging on to some of the personal computers at the research facility.
“No sensitive systems were impacted. The supercomputers are all working,” Christopher Kramer, an Argonne spokesperson, said Friday. “It’s the PCs.”
In addition to telling employees to work from home, Argonne has also canceled all public tours Friday until the Windows outage is fully resolved, Kramer said.
Several Chicago-area banks were also hit by the outage.
Fifth Third, which has 172 branches in the Chicago area and about 2,300 employees, including the bank’s Rosemont headquarters and its downtown office at 222 S. Riverside Plaza, said the outage has had “minimal” impact to its operations Friday.
“The widespread CrowdStrike outage is impacting the ability of some employees to log into their computers,” a Fifth Third spokesperson said. “We are working to address the issue and reinstate access. At this time, impact to our customers and branch network is minimal and our digital and self-service channels are operational. We are monitoring the situation closely.”
JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, which has 276 branches and 15,500 Chicago-area employees, including about 7,200 who regularly work out of its namesake tower in the Loop, is still evaluating the impact of the disruption to its operations.
The outage also affected radio and TV broadcast operations, including stations in Chicago.
Audacy, the nation’s second largest radio chain, which owns more than 220 stations, including Chicago powerhouses WBBM-AM 780, WXRT-FM 93.1, WBBM-FM 96.3, WSCR-AM 670 and WUSN-FM 99.5, said a number of its stations were knocked off the air Friday morning.
“Like many companies around the world, we did experience issues as a result of today’s outages,” an Audacy spokesperson said. “All of our stations were back up and running by 8:00 a.m. ET.”
But the Chicago stations resolved their issues sooner than some, and were back on by 6 a.m. CDT, the company said.
Meanwhile Xfinity reported no service disruptions in the Chicago area related to the CrowdStrike issue.
“Our Xfinity services are up and running, and we’re working to determine any other impacts to our business resulting from the CrowdStrike issue,” Comcast spokesperson Jack Segal said.
Customers at Starbucks, on the other hand, likely noticed a disruption. The tech outage took mobile ordering offline.
“Starbucks is among those companies experiencing impacts due to a widespread third-party systems outage, resulting in a temporary outage of our mobile order ahead and pay features,” spokesperson Andrew Trull said in a statement. “We continue to welcome and serve customers in a vast majority of our stores and drive-thrus and are doing everything we can to bring all systems online as quickly as possible. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience.”
The Associated Press and Chicago Tribune’s Molly Morrow contributed.
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