Around 1,600 flights into, within or out of the United States were canceled by Sunday evening, while more than 8,500 US flights were delayed, according to the tracking website FlightAware.com.
More than 1,000 of those cancelations were from Delta Air Lines, the website shows.
The airline is continuing its recovery efforts following “an outside vendor technology issue” resulting in delays and cancelations, Delta said Sunday. The airline is communicating directly with some impacted customers, offering travel vouchers, waivers and SkyMiles Program miles, it said.
In an update to Delta customers Sunday afternoon, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the airline’s teams are still working to recover their system and restore operations.
“Canceling a flight is always a last resort, and something we don’t take lightly,” Bastian said.
On Saturday, 2,136 flights among multiple carriers were canceled, and more than 21,300 flights were delayed, according to FlightAware.
The issue extended beyond airports, with businesses, government agencies, health and emergency services, banks, schools and universities around the world grinding to a halt or seeing services disrupted due to a flawed software update for Microsoft Windows operating systems issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, experts told CNN.
The outage affected an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices, according to Microsoft.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized to customers and said a fix has been deployed, but experts say getting systems back in order will be a lengthy process.
Major airlines have said services are being restored, but there could be more delays and disruptions.
A majority of United Airlines systems have recovered from Friday’s outage, though some delays and cancellations are still possible, the airline said in a statement. More than 400 United flights were canceled Saturday, and over 200 flights were canceled Sunday, according to FlightAware.com.
Delta has paused unaccompanied minor travel until Wednesday due to the outage, the airline announced over the weekend. Unaccompanied children who are already booked on a Delta flight will not be able to travel, and the airline has asked that no new flights be booked for them.
