Technology outage disrupts flights in Hampton Roads; Warner calls for increased security

Hampton Roads was no exception Friday as a global technology outage affected countless digital operations nationwide — including flights, media broadcasts and hospital operations.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike reported the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack. The company said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

Flights at Norfolk International Airport were facing “major delays,” according to FlightView, a website that tracks flights and airports across the United States. The tracker reported that more than half of departing flights were delayed as of 7:40 a.m. Friday.

By 9:45 a.m., the airport said airline systems were coming back online, but the morning’s outage would affect flights throughout the day. About 20 flights were canceled Friday morning. Kellie Bryant arrived in Norfolk about 4:30 a.m. from Smithfield with daughters Ashley and Katelyn to catch a connecting flight to Washington. Their final destination was Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic for a girls’ beach trip.

“(Something was wrong) when we walked downstairs and realized how long the line was for checking baggage,” Katelyn said. “We waited three hours, got up (to the desk) and we couldn’t even check in. We tried to reach United, and they were not helping us at all, so we just missed our flight because we couldn’t check in.”

After several hours of delays and confusion, the Bryants will now fly out of Raleigh on Saturday.

The outage also affected communications for inmates at Hampton Roads jails. The Norfolk and Virginia Beach sheriff’s offices posted around midday Friday that their inmates were unable to make or receive phone calls.

WTKR News 3, a reporting partner of The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press, also reported issues as a result of the outage. According to a post to X the outage prevented the station from going live Friday morning, and in-house engineers worked to resolve issues for viewers.

For Dominion Energy, customer service call centers also were affected. Customers can still use the Dominion app and website to report outages, manage their accounts and pay bills. The Norfolk Tides asked fans to use the team’s website to buy tickets, or to pay in cash at the box office.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner told reporters Friday afternoon that legislators need to establish minimum standards for cybersecurity across key sectors of the economy — primarily in health care, where he said we’re “desperately behind” — to prevent enemies from exploiting these vulnerabilities. He said intelligence officials have described the incident as a “mistake” stemming from a software patch to resolve a vulnerability in Microsoft’s software.

“I need to know from CrowdStrike why they didn’t test this patch in a real-life experiment before they sent it out to all the systems,” Warner said. “Now again, this was a mistake, but it still cost potentially millions if not billions of dollars when we fully build in all the costs of shutting down airports shutting down systems, it shows how vulnerable we are.

“National security now is no longer who has the most tanks and guns, it is things like cyber security,” he continued. “This has to be part of our national security plan.”

Staff writers Colin Warren-Kicks, Josh Janney and Gavin Stone contributed to this story.

Eliza Noe, eliza.noe@virginiamedia.com