For air travelers, the impact has been particularly severe.
According to aviation analytics company Cirium, as of 6 am Eastern Time, some 1,390 flights were cancelled globally, including 512 originating in the United States — “significantly higher than usual at this point in the day.”
Within five hours, that figure had nearly tripled.
As of 3:30 pm Eastern Time today, there were 5,117 cancelled flights globally, representing 4.62% of flights. A total of 2,382 of these are in the United States as several US operators requested FAA assistance with ground stops.
Only 47% of flights have departed on time today according to Cirium.
Travelers from around the globe shared photos of airport displays showing the Windows ‘blue screen of death,’ Microsoft’s signature error page.
By 3:30 pm today, 2,382 flights had been cancelled in the US alone representing 8.9% of scheduled flights according to Cirium data. Delta was particularly affected followed by United Airlines.
Though delays and cancellations at some airlines are expected throughout the rest of the day and full schedule recovery could extend into the weekend leading to increased costs for businesses credit rating and financial services firms do not see long-term effects.
“While the impact is acute in a number of sectors we do not expect it to have a lasting effect. Therefore from a credit perspective we expect the disruption to have a limited impact across our rated universe,” says Morningstar DBRS managing director Elisabeth Rudman.
“However we expect the incident to raise regulatory questions about the oligopolistic nature of critical IT infrastructure globally.”
In a statement this afternoon Moody’s says: “The IT system incident that affected Microsoft’s Azure ecosystem will not have a lasting effect on airlines globally nor their financial performance. Aggregate costs for the airlines will be measured in tens to low hundreds of millions of dollars. This is relatively small compared to IATA’s forecast for $30.5 billion net income in 2024 for the global industry."
“The timing of this morning’s incident could not have been worse coming on a Friday morning in Northern hemisphere summer when daily traffic volumes are at their peak. The incident caused by an external party rather than a misstep within an airline’s or air traffic control’s IT infrastructure spotlights fragility within today’s aviation system both domestically and internationally.”
Moody's notes however that “the interconnectedness needed to efficiently manage the vastness of global airline industry is also its Achilles heel” given that a line of broken code can lead to such disarray.
The Air Current founder and editor Jon Ostrower says it plainly on X: “[W]hen airlines talk about seamless global passenger experience it means they all use common IT system for key functions. The vulnerability (or lack resilience) strategy is on full display here.”
In aviation redundancy aircraft systems serve as essential safety net. There are no doubt lessons learned from today’s global tech outage.
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