Flights at Tampa Bay airports affected by global technology outage

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Tampa Bay airports were impacted by a global computer outage on Friday morning.

The Associated Press reported that a widespread Microsoft outage was disrupting flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world.

Here is how Tampa Bay area airports were affected:

Tampa International Airport

Some flights were grounded for hours at the Tampa airport.

Flight operations resumed at 10:30 a.m., according to an announcement by airport officials.

Passengers are asked to check directly with their airlines for the status of individual flights.

St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport

The airport’s departures and arrivals page shows over two dozen cancelled Allegiant flights.

As of this report, there are 16 cancelled arrivals and 11 cancelled departures.

Allegiant passengers must wait until after 2 p.m. to rebook with the airline, according to a PIE spokesperson.

Sarasota Bradenton International Airport

The airport’s arrivals and departures board shows several delays and cancellations.

In a social media post , airport officials told fliers to check with their airlines for delays and cancellations.

What happened?

Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”

The Federal Aviation Administration said United, America, Delta and Allegiant flights were grounded due to the outage.

“CrowdStrike that is impacting multiple carriers. American is working with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines said in a statement.

As of 5 a.m., the airline said it has been able to “safely re-establish” its operation.

United Airlines said flights that are already airborne are continuing to their destination.

“A third-party software outage impacted computer systems worldwide, including at United. We are resuming some flights but expect schedule disruptions to continue throughout Friday. We have issued a waiver to make it easier for customers to change their travel plans via United.com or the United app,” a United spokesperson said.

Delta said its “flights are paused” due to a “vendor technology issue.”

“Any customers whose flights are impacted will be notified by Delta via the Fly Delta app and text message. Customers should use the Fly Delta app for updates. We apologize for the inconvenience as our teams work through this issue. Reports indicated that other airlines may also be impacted,” a Delta spokesperson said.

The AP reported that an X user posted a screenshot of an alert from Crowdstrike that said the company was aware of “reports of crashes on Windows hosts” related to its Falcon Sensor platform.

CrowdStrike told the AP that the issue believed to be behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack — and that a fix was on the way.

The company said the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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