Appleton International Airport experiences issues during Friday Microsoft outage

APPLETON — Companies around the world were met with IT problems due to a Microsoft outage that is affecting media outlets, hospitals, airports and more.

Early Friday morning, CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, had a defect in a content update for Windows hosts. According to an X post (formerly known as Twitter) from George Kurtz, President and CEO of CrowdStrike, this is not an issue of a cyber attack to its system, and that the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed.

Appleton International Airport felt the impact of the defect throughout Friday morning. From issues with ticketing and being able to change flight seats, to some flights being cancelled or delayed.

The Air Service & Business Development Manager at Appleton International Airport, Jesse Funk, shared with The Post-Crescent some of the options he's recommending to travelers while the system gets fixed.

"We're asking all travelers to download their airlines app and receive notifications that way. Turn on notifications on the app and check with the airline before coming to the airport," Funk said. "So you can also expect a little bit different experience here at the airport as we're working to get some of our systems back online, but we do ask that travelers check with their airline first before coming to the airport."

Some planes have still been able to take off from Appleton. However, Funk explains that part of the problems revolves around the status of destination airports, and what is going on at their end.

"A flight has two points, the starting point and the end point. So just because things are good here in Appleton doesn't mean things are are okay at the other airport. There might be congestion at that airport or gates unavailable, that kind of thing," Funk said. "So they'll stay in Appleton until they know they can land safely and get passengers off at the destination."

Rashad Alexander can be contacted at ralexander@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Appleton International Airport experiences issues during Friday Microsoft outage