Tech outage still affecting NYC airports as delays, cancellations persist at Kennedy and LaGuardia

Flight delays and cancellations continued Saturday in New York City following a massive global technology outage Friday that upended access to travel, health care and banking.

Friday’s disruption at airports across the country continued to affect schedules and travelers as delays and cancellations were racking up. 

As of 6 p.m. Saturday, 6,382 flights within, into and out of the country were delayed and another 2,399 such flights were canceled, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking company. At Kennedy Airport, 290 flights were delayed and 106 flights were canceled, while LaGuardia Airport had 142 delays and 98 cancellations. Long Island MacArthur Airport had one delay.

This comes after a software bug during a routine update delivered by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s Falcon security suite, which includes antivirus and desktop protection. It was not a cyberattack. The company identified a massive glitch that crashed Microsoft Windows systems worldwide on Friday and led to a "blue screen of death" or an infinite rebooting.

While CrowdStrike identified the issue and sent out an automated fix, those unable to receive it would need to resort to a manual fix that involves rebooting computers in safe mode, and manually deleting the offending file.

Speaking on CNBC on Friday, CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz said that while many systems were able to reboot and get back online, for others it is "going to take some more time."

Airlines meanwhile, were scrambling to resume normal operations. American Airlines, the largest major network carrier, said in an email that while it had fully recovered from Friday’s outage, 33 of 43 canceled flights Saturday were due to the outage. Less than 1% of the airline's total operations were canceled as of noon Saturday and it was working to rebook passengers. 

Robert Mann, president of R.W. Mann & Co., an independent airline industry analysis firm in Port Washington, said it could take several days to reaccommodate affected passengers. Staffing, crew and planes remain out of position and customers will have trouble finding open seats on flights already operating at capacity.

Some hospitals also continue to be impacted. Mount Sinai Health System, which includes Mount Sinai South Nassau on Long Island, said it was working through the problem and patients would be notified if their nonurgent care is affected.

"The affected systems have been identified and isolated, and the Mount Sinai Technology team is working quickly to remediate and restore systems that are impacted," a spokesperson for Mount Sinai said in a statement. 

In New York, critical safety services like 911 were operating, but some jurisdictions had to rely on paper backups for dispatch. On Saturday, Gov. Kathy Hochul said in statement that she had "directed that forbearance be granted for those that were unable to conduct business with the state due to the outage, such as individuals needing DMV license renewals."

Scott Jeffreys, a special associate professor of computer science at Hofstra University, said although it was impossible to tell how many companies, government entities and individuals were still struggling to resolve the issue, the ramifications would be felt for days.

"The impact of this is going to go on for weeks, meaning, you know, we can get the major servers up and running, so we can run our airlines, we can run our banking system and the like. But the bigger risk to all of this is how many people's laptops are impacted, and that's going to take much more time to correct."

Jeffreys said that’s because individual computers that were impacted would require a potentially more time-intensive manual fix.

With Janon Fisher