CrowdStrike Travel Chaos: Airlines Struggling Back to Normal Operations

It’s hard enough running an airline at the best of times and maintaining schedules when “usual” events such as weather, ATC restrictions or technical issues strike but when something such as a “CrowdStrike” outage hits from out of nowhere then the challenge becomes even tougher.

Much of the press coverage has been around Friday’s incident but it’s the longer-term lasting damage and lingering operational recovery which can really impact an airline. And things certainly did not improve after the initial impact of the global IT outage for many of the largest carriers around the globe, as the data below reveals.

In absolute terms, the North American based airlines have struggled over the weekend to recover back to their normal operating levels, with Delta Air Lines still seeing around 1,500 cancellations across the whole weekend whilst their two major legacy competitors — United Airlines and American Airlines — appear to have restored services to near normal levels. Across the European carriers Easyjet increased the number of cancellations as a combination of crew duty hours and aircraft resources continued to impact the business, whilst carriers such as British Airways saw cancellations halve from Friday’s level over the weekend. Interestingly, China’s major airlines — while reporting some cancellations — appear to be more in line with their regular levels as no CrowdStrike software supported their operations.

Number of Scheduled Flights Cancelled By Largest Airlines, 19th-21st July 2024

The actual number of airline cancellations caused by the CrowdStrike issue is interesting, but for context purposes placing the data into the percentage of scheduled flights operated is important. We’ve covered that key metric in the chart below.

In percentage terms over the weekend Delta cancelled around 25% of their scheduled flights and remain the most impacted of the airlines analysed. Spirit was the single most affected carrier on Friday 19th July, with nearly one-third of all flights cancelled, but they have now seen their rate of cancellations drop back to just under 10% on Sunday. With over 12% of flights cancelled on Sunday, EasyJet are still struggling to get back to a normal operation and will be hoping for an improvement in the first half of the week.

Percentage of Flights Cancelled by Top 20 Global Airlines, 19th-21st July 2024

Analysis of the twenty largest airports globally reflects the picture of individual airline performance with Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York JFK all reporting high levels of cancellation over the weekend and in the case of Atlanta an increasing proportion of cancellations by Sunday suggestive of other factors at play such as weather in the region. Airports in Europe were back to cancellation rates of around 2% in locations such as Frankfurt and Paris while Amsterdam — which had been as high as 11% on Friday — was back to a much more normal 1.4% cancellation rate.

Percentage of Scheduled Flights Cancelled At Larger Airports, 19th-21st July 2024

The impact of the CrowdStrike IT outage will linger on for a few more days yet, and will stay in the minds of travellers with cancelled holidays for even longer. Again, such events highlight the challenges of an industry dependent on external IT systems that can, and likely will, fail again in the future. Faced with Friday’s failures, airlines had no choice but to cancel flights and every airline wants to recover as quickly as they can. Aircraft and crews on the ground make no cash, especially at this time of the year. But sometimes however hard they try circumstances make that recovery take a little longer than we all would want, and patience really does become a virtue.

Originally published at https://www.oag.com.