Here’s what it was like in the midst of Delta’s CrowdStrike/Windows meltdown at the country’s busiest airport.
I only saw one Blue Screen of Death on Sunday, July 21, across 15 hours of travel via two of the country’s biggest airports, just two days after a botched software update crippled millions of corporate computers running the Windows operating system.
“Maybe things are OK,” I remember thinking as my family took the first steps into New York’s LaGuardia Airport around 9 a.m. Headlines to the contrary on day 3 of the Great Windows Outage of 2024, the ticketing and baggage area didn’t look too bad.
I should have known better. I’d taken literally two steps inside the building before getting the first of about 3,000 delay emails from Delta over the course of the day, to go along with even more notifications from the Flighty and Fly Delta apps. This wasn’t going to be an easy run home from New York to Florida, something I’ve done dozens of times over the years.
I’m no stranger to flight delays. (I spent 15 hours in the Sky Club at LAX in late January — not something I recommend, despite how good it is.) But this one was different. Weather happens. Mechanical issues happen. They suck, but those all come down to safety. This time? A third-party security vendor botched a file inside of Windows. CrowdStrike should have caught it. Microsoft should have caught it. Neither did until it was too late.
