From airports to coffee shops, software glitch snags activities for millions

Friday’s global meltdown caused by a flawed cybersecurity software update that grounded airlines, disabled banking, disconnected 911 and delayed medical procedures also meant that Angela’s Bra Boutique of Farmingdale had trouble reaching customers about women's undergarments.

"When we get incoming calls, nobody’s there. And when we try to do outgoing calls we’re not able to reach," said boutique owner Angela Cascio, age 57.

The glitch caused problems big and small.

Long Island and the New York City area were a microcosm of the catastrophe wrought around the world by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which Friday morning sent out a software glitch, crashing devices running the Microsoft Windows operating system and hobbling the countless services, devices and apps that rely on computers to run.

"It’s scary and a little concerning that something so little can be so significant," Cascio said.

Early Friday, when Gale Cunningham, 66, of Brentwood, tried to buy a Long Island Rail Road ticket via her phone, she couldn’t. She had to go old school: a ticket machine.

"I think that it's very scary that if one system goes down almost the whole world goes into chaos, that is unsettling and unnerving," she said.

At the Starbucks on Main Street in Huntington, supervisor Brandon Schindlar, 24, arrived for work around 7 a.m. to find that none of the computerized systems were working.

"We had to go back to our roots and write on the cups," he said. The computerized system that prints a sticker showing customers’ names and orders was down.

Schindlar said their busiest hours are between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., and that by 11 a.m. the store often had already hit about $4,000 in sales. But even with mobile orders down, the location was still almost as busy as usual, which led him to believe people who tried to order online were now coming in person.

"Everything that we do runs off Microsoft so, you know, we crash with it," he said.

As the morning went on, systems sporadically began to come back up. At 9 a.m., the store still couldn’t receive mobile orders, and the Starbucks app still wasn’t working. But the machine that prints stickers had returned.

Of course, the global IT outages went beyond inconveniences in the sale of bras, coffee and transit tickets, to far more consequential perils.

At Value Drugs in downtown Huntington, patient medications were delayed because of sporadic bugs in the electronic system used to send and receive prescriptions.

"I could go a full hour without having a prescription come in electronically," he said, "and in a 15 minute span, I could get 15 or 20."

"It’s slower because we’re not getting prescriptions in, but it’s very stressful that when all of the sudden it comes in, we get 10, 15 at one time and then the people are coming in for them."

And some services at NYU Langone Hospital—Long Island in Mineola were disrupted, too.

Tamara Jimenez, 38, of Freeport, an administrative supervisor there, said that staff had difficulty communicating, including via the Microsoft mail app Outlook.

"It's annoying because our Outlook is not working so we can't email," she said, adding: "It’s very frustrating trying to get your work done . . . We just communicate through texts or phone calls."

At the region’s airports, hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled. Stranded passengers sat in the few available chairs; others were perched on ledges, luggage and the floor.

Luciana Vazquez, 45, a schoolteacher, of Buenos Aires, and her brother, wandered into a Kennedy Airport AirTrain corridor to ask a worker about any available hotels.

CrowdStrike’s IT problems are wreaking havoc on her family vacation with 14 relatives visiting New York. The family’s flight Friday to Orlando from Kennedy was canceled and rescheduled — and due to the group’s size, they couldn't be rebooked until Sunday, she said. No earlier flights were available — even if the group was willing to be split up on different flights. Now they’ll be paying for two hotels: one in Florida and another in New York.

"We have the tickets in Orlando, we have the hotel in Orlando, and we’re not going to be reimbursed for anything," Vazquez said.

Their Orlando leg, which was supposed to last a week, will be shorter. Less time for Disney World.

Ben Zela, 18, of Bergen County, New Jersey, sat on the airport floor. He didn’t know whether his flight would be delayed. His mom, whom he was meeting at Kennedy, has the family’s flight information.

Five members of the family were all flying to Peru — or were supposed to. His siblings, who were originally on an earlier flight, checked en route to the airport and saw that their flights were canceled. Zela was trying to call his mother to find out whether he was affected. But she was not answering her phone.

Will the family all be able to fly to Lima, as planned?

Zela, a pharmacy tech and college student studying computer science and math, replied: "We'll see."