Crowdstrike’s recent outages led to waves of chaos for business travelers and I had a front row seat from the chaos.
What was the Crowdstrike outage?
In June 2024, a security patch update from the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike propagated onto millions of devices globally for B2B companies like Microsoft, which led to blue screen outages for major brands like Delta and Starbucks.
I spent more than 30 hours trying to get back home to Atlanta from Washington DC after a cancelled flight.
Airports were tense and eerie and the news focused on passengers with cancelled flights. The magnitude of this interruption extends far beyond the travel industry, though. Analyst firm Gartner estimates that more than 10% of large enterprise companies use Crowdstrike software.
It’s ironic that Microsoft is a Crowdstrike customer to prevent this exact sort of event.
All of those blue screens had a relatively simple solution. I found the steps on Reddit, and they’re not hard. I’ve rolled back an Operating System version on a personal laptop before, and I’m certainly not a developer or software engineer.
While most PCs were okay, thousands of Microsoft’s enterprise customers were impacted. There were cascading consequences like when a snowstorm hits a major city and all the flights get grounded there. Those grounded flights will delay other flights and strand connecting travelers. Even a single major city can reverberate throughout the entire country creating delays and cancellations. The difference here is that it was a global event.
The Looming Risk of Natural Communication Outages
Remember in May 2024 when southern Americans could somehow see the Northern Lights (with your phone) in the Southern states?
The aurora was beautiful, but it was actually the result of a solar storm. Solar flares are classified just like hurricanes on a scale of 1-4 . A Category 4 hurricane can flood a major city. This was a Category G4 geomagnetic storm, the largest solar storm since 2003, and it temporarily weakened Earth’s ozone layer.
An atmospheric shift at this scale gave people the rare opportunity to see the Aurora Borealis effect in lower latitudes.
Aurora visibility in the deep south was actually predicted.
The FCC and NASA were on high alert. If another solar storm were to disrupt communications in low earth orbit, then we’d all lose GPS and cell reception simultaneously.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issues a storm watch leading into the solar event, and US Homeland Security even asked the public to track the impact on the communication sector in an FCC notice.
My Long Journey Home
After I spent 4 nights at a technology conference in Washington DC, I was ready to get home and see my wife and 2-year old son. The trip hd overlapped with our wedding anniversary, and I know how hard it can be with a toddler alone.
On Friday, I heard quiet chatter at the conference about some cancelled flights (I don’t really turn the news on at these events). People were groaning and joking about delays. My afternoon flight was delayed, then cancelled. Annoying, but it happens, I guess? The Delta mobile app wouldn’t load properly on my phone. As I packed for the airport, I couldn’t get their website to load either.
A colleague shared FlightAware’s Misery Map and that’s when I called my wife to break the news: I really don’t think I’ll make it out of DC today.
I thought there might be a chance, so I checked out of my hotel and brought luggage to talk to someone in person about rebooking my flight at Reagan International Airport. The airport was packed, lines were long, and everyone was frustrated. It took 45 minutes to get to the front of a line where I learned that all flights home to Atlanta were cancelled, and the agent started exploring creative multi-city trips to get me home. We looked at DC>Nashville>ATL. She suggested that I fly up to La Guardia and maybe get lucky with standby, or fly through Raleigh Durham tomorrow.
I was somehow stuck in DC, unable to get home.
I opted for the first flight out to North Carolina on Saturday. At least that’s moving in the right direction. Delta gave me a hotel voucher and I found when I arrived at the next hotel, I started to see second-level effects. There were more than 50 guests that Delta sent to the Marriott and they were not staffed for it.
Overnight they cancelled another one of my flights. This was starting to feel like Tom Hanks in The Terminal. Back to the airport. I was getting frustrated. There were sad faces on blue screens of death. All the digital signage was broken above all the gates and the same bright blue screen glowed at the Delta Sky Lounge where they were struggling to check-in guests.
All Atlanta flights were cancelled or perpetually delayed.
The frustration was real, but what stood out were the few people who kept it together. One gate agent calmly explained the situation despite the pressure. Adrienne S Ball deserves a shoutout. She stayed late to help a long line of travelers instead of just walking off at shift’s end. That kind of human effort made all the difference.
This is a good reminder that on the other side of every glitch, delay, or cancellation are people trying help you get somewhere. Technology shapes our journey, but it was the agents, employees and strangers, who helped me get through the chaos.
Eventually, I got on a flight to Raleigh, then finally home, exhausted but relieved. It took me nearly 2 days to get DCA>ATL.
This whole experience made me consider how much we rely on a handful of companies to keep things running smoothly. One software update from Crowdstrike brought down systems nationwide, and it really exposed to me just how fragile our digital infrastructure can be.
I hope this serves as a wake-up call to build systems that are more resilient and to value the human side of customer experience. Because when technology fails, it is the human connection that really keeps us moving forward.