Friday’s global computer outage kept planes grounded

On Friday, a computer glitch caused many problems at airports worldwide. From Sydney over Dubai to Berlin, nearly 4,300 aircraft had to be grounded, with the US, Britain, India, and Australia particularly affected.

In Belgium, the damage from the computer malfunction remained relatively limited, with delayed flights at Brussels Airport—courtesy of the old computer system.

35,500 flights delayed globally

The global computer outage was caused by an update to security software from the American cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. The update caused an estimated 8.5 million computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating systems to crash, including information screens that displayed the famous “blue screen of death.”

The consequences were dire. Hospitals, government offices, factories, television stations, and so on were disrupted, just as thousands of flights were canceled. A total of 4,295 flights were affected, or 3.9% of all flights scheduled worldwide on Friday, and 35,500 were delayed globally. Several international airports, including about seven in the US, including Boston and Las Vegas, had to close temporarily.

Fallback system

The disruption at Brussels Airport was not too bad—at Rome-Fiumicino Airport, for example, 60 flights were canceled. Most problems at Brussels Airport were due to the Microsoft Azure check-in system used by many airlines, including American Airlines, TUI, Turkish Airlines, and RyanAir, which caused long queues.

Brussels Airlines also runs on Microsoft for check-in, so users on the site or app may have faced technical problems loading their profile or retrieving their booking. However, the inconvenience was not too bad because Brussels Airport has a fallback system or alternative emergency system that airlines can use.

That software program took a bit more time and caused a delay in check-in, increasing waiting times here and there. However, the inconvenience could also be due to other airports being affected by IT problems, causing inconvenience on some specific flights or having to be canceled.

The IT breakdown also caused problems at Charleroi Airport. Check-in, in particular, was slow because employees had to check in manually for some time.

Anyone who missed a flight due to computer problems at the airport is generally entitled to compensation from the airline.

Need for greater resilience.

Friday’s IT outage, unprecedented in the range and scale of systems it has impacted, at least led several cybersecurity experts to raise serious concerns about how exposed services are with a potential overreliance on specific operating systems.

According to Dr. Harjinder Lallie, an associate professor at the University of Warwick, “this IT ‘catastrophe’ highlights the need for greater resilience, a greater focus on backup systems, and possibly even a need to rethink whether we are using the most resilient operating systems for such critical systems.

More diversity, for example, in the use of different operating systems, could be a solution. Consequently, some voices are also calling for the governments to do more to boost competition so that a few companies no longer control so much of the essential infrastructure.

BA intermodal hub

Today, it was also announced that Brussels Airport will receive 4,5 million European subsidies to prepare a study for the development of the Brussels Airport intermodal hub, which will seamlessly integrate different modes of transport, including rail, public transport, and cycling. So writes the newspaper Le Soir.

Airport-specific simulation tools will also be developed as part of the research. Specifically, the project should study how the various modes of transport can be even better connected and how the range of public transport to and from the airport can be expanded.