Many customers have been stranded at the airport since the outage first began shortly before midnight.
“My flight was supposed to take off at 12:46 a.m. to Minneapolis, Minnesota,” said Lena Miles, who was flying through the Delta terminal of SFO. “We kept being told we would be updated at 1 a.m., then 3 a.m., then 5.”
Around 6 a.m., she still hadn’t been able to speak with a customer service representative about whether her flight might take off.
Brooke Pyle also spent the night in the airport trying to get home to Jacksonville for her birthday. Her flight was supposed to leave Thursday around 11 p.m.
“We boarded and took forever and we taxied, and then they turned us around and said we had to deplane because there was a technical issue.”
Her flight was repeatedly delayed and eventually canceled around 5 a.m.
“The lines were already crazy long — we got in one line and they sent us to a different line,” Pyle told KQED. She said that she was also in a virtual queue to speak with a Delta representative on the phone, but the wait time was estimated at over eight hours.
Some planes still stalled around 10 a.m. were waiting on in-flight staff. Passengers waiting for their flights to take off cheered as pilots and flight attendants arrived at the terminal.
By mid-afternoon, more than 90 flights were delayed or canceled at both San José and Oakland international airports.
Some court systems have also been impacted.
“Our presiding judge gets to work really early, I think he arrives around 6 or 7 a.m., and he logged into his computer and it did not turn on — it just had that blue screen,” said Paul Rosynski, a spokesperson for Alameda County Superior Court.
“In the modern times, all our case files are electronic now.”
Both of the court’s case management systems experienced delays caused by the outage through the morning, but Rosynski said the court remained open and all scheduled appearances would proceed.
“Worst case scenario, we’re just going to go old school and take notes and do everything by paper,” Rosynski told KQED.
By noon, both their criminal and civil case management systems were operational. IT personnel were still working to get desktop computers back online, and Rosynski expected all to be up and running before Monday morning.
A spokesperson for Santa Clara County Superior Court said desktop computers across all courthouses were affected, and IT personnel were working on its networks. The teams were prioritizing courtrooms with morning schedules to minimize delays.
San Francisco’s Superior Court is not affected, a spokesperson said.
In Oakland, the outages “have caused many computers to become inaccessible and are being evaluated and responded to now,” according to a statement on X.
Across the state, some incarcerated people are also unable to contact their loved ones, as the California Department of Corrections’ communication provider ViaPath is experiencing outages on all Windows-based services. In a statement, the department said that it “understands how important it is for incarcerated people to stay connected to their loved ones,” and is working to restore the service.
CrowdStrike believes that the outage was caused by a faulty content update, and was not the result of a cyberattack or security incident.
George Kurtz, the company’s CEO, said that the issue had been identified and a solution was deployed early Friday. But because so many Windows machines and systems around the world were affected, it could take much longer for systems to return to normal. Many affected systems are crashing continually in what’s known as a reboot loop and must be restarted in safe mode to manually remove the files CrowdStrike identified as the issue — and that has to be done one machine at a time.
“We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption. We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” Kurtz said in the post.
KQED’s Caroline Smith and Sukey Lewis contributed to this report. It has been updated.
