Flights at Toronto’s two airports were cancelled or delayed on Friday due to a global IT outage, leaving some travellers in Toronto with their vacation plans up in the air.
Zain Husain was supposed to leave for a friend’s wedding in Idaho at 7 a.m., but started encountering problems as soon as he went to check-in.
“They had some problems with check-in. There was maybe about 10 people or so in the line and that took about an hour-and-a-half before it got to me,” Husain said, noting the airline, United, didn’t say much about the outage at first.
“And then you’re getting these reports that there’s outages happening, things of that nature,” he said, adding that he’s since been booked on a later flight but that the situation was “very dicey.”
For Porter customers, flights have been cancelled until at least 3 p.m. as the Canadian carrier navigates the outage.
“They don’t know what’s going on,” a woman named Jennifer, whose 10 a.m. flight from Toronto Pearson International Airport to Halifax was cancelled, told CP24 Friday morning.
“We didn’t know anything coming here. We saw the crowds were lined up and seeing ‘cancelled’ up on the [departures] board,” Irene, Jennifer’s travel companion, added.
Porter, which operates flights out of Pearson and Billy Bishop Airport, explained to CP24 that they’re unable to rebook flights while their systems are offline and they can’t communicate with customers via email or text.
Initially, the airline said they would cancel flights until 12 p.m., but extended that timeline in an update issued Friday morning.
A number of American airlines were also affected by the outage, including the aforementioned United, American and Delta, resulting in a number of cancellations and delays.
Other Canadian airlines, such as Air Canada and WestJet, were not affected by the IT incident. NAV Canada, which pilots rely on to navigate the skies, was also unaffected.
The outage was caused by a software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and is impacting any computer that runs Microsoft Windows. CrowdStrike said the outage was not a security incident and systems are slowing coming back online.
This is a developing story. More to come.
With files from The Associated Press