CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Thousands of people were stranded at Charlotte Douglas International Airport on Friday due to a CrowdStrike outage that led to a global ground stop for all flights for several hours.
Hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled at Charlotte Douglas, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware. Airport officials said some airlines resumed operations just before 10 a.m. but cautioned passengers to be prepared for more delays and cancellations. The airport warned travelers not to arrive at Charlotte Douglas until confirming their flight was happening.
With the status of flights uncertain, many people flocked to find a rental car if their destination was within driving distance. One man told WCNC Charlotte he'd given up on finding a flight to Cleveland, so he secured a rental and was hitting the road.
"My flight was canceled, so I'm going to drive," Ernie Miller said. "I'm happy Hertz had cars, I was worried they weren't going to have any cars."
Miller, who was in Charlotte on business, said his drive to Cleveland wasn't one way. He'll be back next week for another business meeting. And yes, he's driving back in the same rental car he scored on Friday.
"I'm gonna take the car home and drive back on Monday," Miller said. "I'm here on business, so I had a flight canceled, so I'm going to drive home and I'm coming back for more business next week."
Miller was fortunate to secure that rental car. Airport officials confirmed to WCNC Charlotte's Destiny Richards that anyone without a reservation wouldn't get a car on Friday.
In an interview with the TODAY Show, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz explained that the outage was caused by a software bug included in an update that went out to Windows machines. Kurtz said the issue was identified quickly and a fix was sent out, bringing some computers back online quickly.
"We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue," he said. "And as systems come back online, as they're being rebooted, they're coming back and they're working."
Despite that, Kurtz said some systems weren't able to accept the automatic update to fix the bug. For those systems, it could be a while before operations are restored.
"Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it's coming up and (being) operational because we fixed it on our end," he said. "Some of the systems that aren't recovering, we're working with them. It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won't recover."
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