400 flights canceled at Spanish airports due to computer crisis | Economy

More than 3,800 canceled flights and 34,400 delayed departures are just one example of the chaos experienced this Friday at airports around the world, according to data collected by the flight tracking platform FlightAware. The global outage of computer systems linked to a failure in the CrowdStrike antivirus update has had a particular impact on air transport, from which neither Aena nor the airlines operating in Spain have been spared.

The airport manager confirmed before dawn that neither the billing system nor the information screens were working in terminals across the country. By 2:30 pm it had 105 flights cancelled, out of the 3,520 it had managed to operate. Data at 7:00 pm shows 400 planes on the ground, compared to a total of 5,600 managed by the public operator. Across the Spanish airport network, queues and tensions between passengers and workers are widespread, but no infrastructure has been shut down, unlike other large European airports, with a high volume of operations on a Friday in July.

“This phenomenon has occurred worldwide. However, in Spain we have overcome it with the fewest possible incidents. Congratulations to Ana and all the company’s employees for making operations as close to normal as possible even in such difficult circumstances,” Transport Minister Oscar Puente wrote on his account on the social network X.

Manual management of passenger billing and boarding processes has been implemented, while Aena activated its contingency system. By early afternoon, working directly with its antivirus provider, CrowdStrike, to implement a definitive solution, they had already claimed to have the most critical ones in place.

The largest European low-cost airline, Ryanair, had already warned its customers about a “global blackout” that could delay their flights. They also launched alerts about flight cancellations, events including at European airports such as Berlin (Germany), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Dublin (Ireland) or Prague (Czech Republic), where passenger traffic is managed manually.

The crisis is having the worst impact on air transport in the United States, where airlines such as Delta, United and American Airlines have halted their operations in the early morning due to a communication problem, leaving planes on the ground, said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA, for its acronym in English), reports Miguel Jiménez. For example, American Airlines reported the resumption of its flights at 5:00 a.m. local time.

As the day progressed, other airports such as Mumbai, India, Singapore’s Changi, Hong Kong, and Sydney International switched to manual check-in processes due to the incident that originated in the United States and was detected in Spain at 9:00 pm on Thursday and also reached the Asian continent and Australia.

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