Flights Grounded as Thousands of RNC Attendees Try to Leave Milwaukee

Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Image from the airport.

A global cyber outage grounded flights at airports across the country the same day Republican National Convention (RNC) attendees prepared to takeoff.

It’s being attributed to a single faulty software update, and it has grounded and delayed more than a dozen flights out of Milwaukee Friday, disrupting travel plans for RNC delegates and the national political press attempting to leave the city.

The tech failure didn’t just hit airports. Governments across the world are reporting cyber systems knocked out across multiple industries including banking, health care and shipping, among others.

The outage has been attributed to an error in a software update for Falcon Sensor, a platform created by the cyber security firm CrowdStrike, which is based in Austin, Texas. The firm announced that the failure was not the result of a cyber attack but “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”

The U.S. Cyber Security Infrastructure Agency (CISA) is in agreement with CrowdStrike about the cause of the global outage and also urging caution, as it has created an opening for bad actors “taking advantage of this incident for phishing and other malicious activity.” CISA is urging organizations and individuals be on alert for potentially cyber security threats, and avoid clicking on suspicious emails or links.

At Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport, thousands of visitors to Milwaukee were planning to fly home on Friday. The airports status page for upcoming arrivals and departures shows there are 11 cancelled flights and 13 delayed at the airport as of 12:25 p.m.

The data from the airport is only for upcoming flights. An independent flight tracker called FlightAware shows the airport has had more than 60 delayed flights and nearly two dozen cancellations since the day began. The airport confirmed FlightAware’s data is accurate.

“None of the Airport’s infrastructure was affected by the technology outage,” Airport Spokesperson Harold Mester told Urban Milwaukee. “Some of the airlines had network wide outages that result in delayed or canceled flights. Some of these delays and cancellations are lingering into the afternoon and evening today.”

For any travelers passing through Milwaukee Mitchell today, Mester said they should sign up for the airport’s text alerts “to immediately get the latest flight status for their flight.”

The system failures began occurring early Friday morning, and 4 a.m. the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it was “closely monitoring a technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines.” Airlines had begun requesting “ground stops” to give them time to respond to the system errors.

Ground Stops are considered the most restrictive method for keeping flights on the ground and they are used when “air traffic control is unable to safely accommodate additional aircraft in the system,” according to the FAA. They are employed for bad weather, major equipment outages and catastrophic events.