On July 19, 2024, a software update from CrowdStrike caused a major disruption by triggering blue screens of death on Windows machines globally. This incident led to a widespread IT outage that impacted various sectors, including grounding commercial airline flights worldwide, taking Sky News offline, and disrupting 911 emergency call centers.
We decided to take a quick look at flight statistics accumulated by AeroDataBox API during the day to see how much was of the impact on the worldwide air traffic was reflected in our API.
Even though our data coverage may be limited, we still managed to get some insights (and you can too if you use our Airport Delay API).
Global and Regional Effects
Delay index is an abstract measure that we use here. It takes delays and cancellations within preceding 2 hours into account. It can be anywhere from 0.0 to 5.0, where 0.0 is the best situation and 5.0 – is the worst. We too
Here you can see some global and regional averages of all delay indexes for airports and regions that we track. The bigger the region, the less this average will fluctuate.
You may notice that global flight traffic index changes just slightly on July 19, 2024 comparing to the previous 2 days. But even a slightest change is a big deal because even for that a lot of airports worldwide need to suffer from extended periods of significant delays at the same time.
The most noticeable change is in 🇪🇺 Europe, which is likely also attributed to the fact the fact that we have good coverage of data for major airports in the region.
In the U.S. 🇺🇸 and inCanada 🇨🇦 the change is a bit less visible due to nationally increasing delay indices across both countries at the end of each day. Also, we did not account for the “weight” of airports in this calculation, that is why the effect was smoothened due to the large amount of airports covered in the area. But even then, it’s clearly visible that on July 19, flight delays were steadily higher for the whole day due to the CrowdStrike outage.
Similar spikes of delays were observed in Australia 🇦🇺 and in Asia 🌏.
Airport Insights
Here we looked at a situation in several individual airports.
Where available, we looked into cancelled flights statistics (the sum of all cancelled vs all planned flights within previous 2 hours at every point of time), as well as the median (the 50th percentile) delay of flights, in minutes, and plotted it onto a chart for July 19, 2024 and July 18 (for comparison).
🇳🇱 Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS)
Departing Flights – July 18 & July 19
Arriving Flights – July 18 & July 19
🇬🇧 London Heathrow (LHR)
Departing Flights – July 18 & July 19
Arriving Flights – July 18 & July 19
🇪🇸 Barcelona (BCN)
Departing Flights – July 18 & July 19
Arriving Flights – July 18 & July 19
Certainly, this is very simplistic express analysis of the raw data and situation is set to develop tomorrow as airlines may need to accommodate the customers who suffered the flight delays and cancellations.
Even though our data coverage may be limited, our Airport Delay API allows to get the information about current and historical statistics of delays in all covered airports.
Subscribe now and try it yourself!