Last week’s global tech outage threw systems across the world into chaos, and the impact still being felt as companies struggle to recover. To that end, one flight attendant on TikTok is warning anyone considering travel to reconsider for the time being.
“If you’re thinking about flying right now, coming from a flight attendant, just don’t,” Tori (@traveling.mermaidd) tells her followers in a TikTok video she shared Tuesday.
From a hotel room in Chicago, she says that she’d been on two flights between 8:55am and 7:40pm that day, both of which had been delayed.
“The reason why so many of these flights are getting delayed is because the tech outage messed up the crew tracking system, so now, the majority of the time, at least what I’ve been experiencing, is that pilots are all over the place, and they don’t know where to send them,” she explains. “So usually these flights are being canceled because we haven’t had pilots.”
How is the IT outage impacting air travel?
When cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike pushed a software update to computers across the world last Friday, resulting in the IT outage, one of the widely reported on issues was airport delays. According to Forbes, airlines reported over 46,000 flight delays and 5,171 cancelations that day, with the impact lessening—but still impacting a significant number of flights—by Monday morning.
Delta Airlines flights within the United States appear to have been the most heavily affected, while international travel on the whole has recovered more quickly. This was reflected in the responses to Tori’s warning on TikTok, as viewers with travel plans wondered how they might fare.
“It’s only really Delta that’s still reeling like this,” wrote one commenter. “The other majors are back to normal at this point.”
Another user claimed that United Airlines flights have been backed up as well, noting, “They are struggling because of picking up deltas slack.”
“I flew spirit, and my flight was fine,” a further commenter reported. “…had to cancel my delta flight.”
“Car rentals are an issue too. When I landed at Atlanta I had no car rental my guess is everybody drove when they couldn’t fly,” added another.
Air travel conditions are improving
The good news is that by Wednesday, anecdotally speaking, Tori had gained the impression behind the scenes that things were starting to move in the right direction. She says in a follow-up video that she only had one flight that day that was delayed, and only by two hours, which she called the “best case scenario” at that point.
@traveling.mermaidd airport choas #flightattendant #cabincrew #microsoft #airlines #aviation ♬ original sound – T ♡ | Flight Attendant
“It seems like things are coming together moreso,” she adds. “I definitely have hope. I think crew tracking’s getting it together. So I wouldn’t be totally alarmed if you have a flight. Don’t go canceling everything; definitely try it.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Tori via email.
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