PORTLAND, Ore. — A global technology outage is impacting airports, including Portland International Airport (PDX), with dozens of flights canceled or delayed.
As of 1:30 p.m., 48 arriving flights are delayed and 19 are canceled on Friday, according to FlyPDX.com. For departures, 25 flights are delayed and 16 have been canceled. The airport's website was down earlier Friday morning but is back online.
Several major airlines in the U.S. grounded flights, including American Airlines, Delta, Frontier and United for several hours. Early Friday morning, those airlines said at least some flights were resuming.
There were still long lines of travelers stretching down the main lobby at PDX early Friday morning. By 6:30 a.m., though, the lines were starting to improve.
KGW spoke to some travelers who were frustrated and said they had been stuck at the airport for hours. One woman KGW spoke to said she may not make her niece's wedding because of the outage.
"I have cried my eyes out," she said, adding that she was trying to see if she could get another plane ticket.
Will Drewes told KGW he was supposed to fly to New York at 9 p.m. on Thursday to visit his sister and newborn niece.
"I noticed that the previous flight was not leaving the gate for a while and just kept getting delayed, my flight, hour after hour. Eventually I saw the news and yeah, not going out to New York," Drewes said.
Around 2 a.m. on Friday, American Airlines officially canceled his flight.
"The plane has been there so long that the crew had reached their maximum hours they're allowed to work on a shift per day," Drewes said. "Luckily I live here, so I can just go back home and crash. Glad I'm not staying in town for the weekend and have to deal with finding a hotel or something."
PDX is asking travelers to check their flight status or contact airlines directly before heading to the airport.
What caused the global tech outage?
The outage is linked back to U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which provides anti-cyberattack services to Microsoft. The company said a content update caused problems with Windows, disrupting businesses around the world. Banks, hospitals, media outlets and some internet providers also reported outages.
KGW reporters Thomas Shults and Evan Watson contributed to this report.