Laurence Dollimore
MORE than 100 flights have been cancelled in Spain today following a global IT outage.
Hundreds of companies around the world have seen their operations upended by a fault in Microsoft’s operating system.
Among the affected are airports, airlines, banks, supermarkets and government institutions, including Britain’s NHS.
At Malaga airport, chaos ensued after staff were forced to carry out boarding, billing and check-ins manually.
One traveller told La Opinion de Malaga: “They are checking in by hand. We should have left at 11am, for now they have delayed it until 1pm.”
The Costa del Sol airport this afternoon said their systems were recovering following the IT crash.
National airport operator Aena reported a total of 105 flights had been cancelled nationwide.
Videos taken from Ibiza airport today showed hundreds of passengers staring up at timetable screens.
The scenes were described as ‘chaotic’ with ‘more and more people arriving and filling up’ the terminal.
Aena said ‘all airports are operational, but some processes are inevitably operating slower than usual, which is causing some delays.’
It added: “Both departure and arrival operations are taking place with delays that are increasingly smaller, but they have not been paralysed at any time.
“Likewise, the staff of some airlines are guiding passengers, offering more personalised attention due to this incident.”
A faulty update to the CrowdStrike cybersecurity platform is the source of the failure in Microsoft’s systems.
The company has admitted that a failure in an update to its CrowdStrike Falcon platform has caused the chaos, and assured that it is working to reverse the changes.
