How a global internet outage affected Tampa Bay

The global internet outage Friday that originated from a faulty software update caused a slew of disruptions in the Tampa Bay area, including hundreds of canceled and delayed flights, restaurants having to accept only cash and information technology workers scrambling to get computer systems on track.

Much of the region had recovered from service delays by the afternoon. The local airports were largely the most affected businesses in the area as thousands of passengers waited for flights they hoped wouldn’t be canceled or sought other options if they were.

The outage affected Microsoft services after CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that is used by half of the Fortune 500 companies, issued the update. The firm said the issue was not related to hacking or a cyberattack.

The technology failure rippled across nearly all walks of life, highlighting the globe’s extreme reliance on technology and just a few computing providers.

The botched update was meant to strengthen protection against malware and hackers and was sent to millions of computers, said Roger Grimes, a data expert at KnowBe4, a Clearwater-based cybersecurity company. Computers that downloaded the update were met with the a “blue screen of death.”

“That blue screen is where the operating system says, ‘Hey, this error is in such a critical portion of the operating system that it’s safer to just kill it immediately,’” Grimes said.

Some industries, like airlines, were harmed more than others. Allegiant Air, for example, had its website down for hours Friday morning. The airline canceled all morning flights out of St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport in response to the outage.

Airlines may have been particularly affected because their systems operate constantly, Grimes said.

That means airline systems may have been some of the first to download the faulty CrowdStrike update. But there was still a degree of randomness to which companies got hit the hardest, he said.

At the St. Pete-Clearwater airport, just one flight — a Sun Country flight bound for Gulfport, Mississippi, at 11:10 a.m. — was able to take off Friday morning. Allegiant Air, the main commercial airline at St. Pete-Clearwater, canceled all flights scheduled before 2 p.m.

The airline’s systems had begun recovering by Friday afternoon, but 14 of Allegiant’s 26 flights for the day already had been canceled.

But then signs of recovery: One Allegiant flight took off for Greensboro, North Carolina, around 2:30 p.m., then one bound for Albany, New York, took off just before 4 p.m.

A youth group comprised of 42 middle and high school students were stranded at St. Pete-Clearwater early Friday. The group intended to board a flight home to Bridgeport, West Virginia, but instead they braced for a 17-hour bus ride with six chaperones.

Despite eight hours of waiting already under his belt, Andrew Ward, 18, was happy to spend the extra hours with friends.

Ward said of the update failure: “It’s kinda nerve-wracking to know that one system could go down, and it affects everything.”

Tampa International Airport was fully operational by 10:30 a.m., though delays and cancellations mounted. More than half of flights — 56% — were canceled or delayed by Friday afternoon. Out of 508 flights, 237 were delayed and 49 were canceled.

Mildred Hicks and her daughter were two passengers with delayed flights. The pair arrived at the airport just after noon, but their New York flight was delayed until 7 p.m.

Next to their gate, another flight was canceled. She didn’t even want to ask airline employees if hers might be, too.

“If we don’t say that, it might not happen, right?” Hicks said.

While travelers were dealing with flight headaches, others in Tampa Bay experienced minor disruptions to their morning routines.

Booking issues confused early morning instructors and gym-goers at Orange Theory businesses across the region. Hungry customers who sought breakfast at First Watch, a restaurant chain, had to pay with cash while computers were down. And baristas at a St. Petersburg Starbucks wrote orders in Sharpie like it was 2012.

Grimes said the system failures across the world were a sign that CrowdStrike hadn’t done proper testing on its update. But he said it’s better that systems failed due to a botched anti-malware update than due to a ransomware attack, like the cyberattack that roiled Florida’s Department of Health earlier this month.

While some Tampa Bay hospital computers that use Microsoft experienced outages, patients were not affected, according to hospital officials across the region.

In the past year, the healthcare sector has taken multiple hits from cyberattacks. Last July, a “criminal group” stole confidential information of about 1.2 million Tampa General Hospital patients, including social security numbers.

More recently in February, a massive attack crippled a company used by Florida hospitals and doctors to submit medical claims to insurers and caused an estimated $1.3 billion in unpaid claims.

Just last week, Floridan’s recent HIV test results were among the thousands of records seized by hackers.

“This problem will be mostly over in a day or so,” Grimes said of the Friday outage.

A ransomware attack, he said, can take days or weeks from which to recover.

The Associated Press and Times staff writers Lesley Cosme Torres, Tony Marrero, Helen Freund, Christopher O’Donnell and Sam Ogozalek contributed to this report.