A software problem affecting industries around the world was quickly resolved in many quarters, but lingering bugs and bad weather could continue to affect air travel into the weekend.
Bangor International Airport in a Friday afternoon Facebook post said the Federal Aviation Administration predicts delays and cancellations could spill over into Saturday.
“In addition to these travel disruptions, thunderstorms along the East Coast have the potential of causing further changes to itineraries throughout the weekend,” the airport wrote.
The FAA said the airlines United, American, Delta and Allegiant had all been grounded.
“Today there are delays all over the world, literally,” an FAA spokesperson said in a video posted to Facebook. “It has nothing to do with us here. There was a software update that affected many industries across the world.”
The global cyber outage is also impacting Portland International Jetport’s airline partners and multiple flights had been delayed or canceled as of Friday morning.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said that the software problem 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.
Microsoft 365 posted on social media platform X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact” and that it was “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
In Bangor, many city services were “unavailable” Friday morning because of the outage. That included payment processing and registrations. Those services were restored later in the morning. The outage didn’t affect emergency services, according to the city.
Those disruptions appeared Friday morning to have not affected state government services, but the Maine Office of Information Technology continues to monitor state systems and services, according to Sharon Huntley, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Administrative & Financial Services.
Maine State Police dispatch centers have not been affected. However, New Hampshire’s 911 system did experience an interruption that lasted a few hours. Its service has now been fully restored.
MaineHealth said its system was not been affected.
The phrase, “pack your patience” is no joke this weekend,” Bangor International Airport wrote on Facebook. “Please extend kindness to your fellow passengers, airline ticket counter staff, gate agents, TSA officers, and flight crews. No one has a magic wand, so working together is the best approach.”
BDN writer Christopher Burns and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
