Los Angeles International Airport began to return to normal on Saturday, although some delays continued to occur, in the aftermath of a global technical outage that disrupted air travel.
As of midday Saturday, tracking website FlightAware reported that more than 120 departing flights from Los Angeles International Airport (14% of the total at the time) were delayed and more than 40 were canceled, while more than 150 arriving flights were delayed and more than 40 were canceled.
“While there are some delays and cancellations as our partner airlines return to normal operations following the global technical issue, overall it’s shaping up to be a much better day at LAX,” said Los Angeles World Airports spokesperson Dey Levine.
“We want to help passengers get to their destination smoothly and safely, and we urge passengers to check their flight information with their airline before departing to the airport,” Levine said.
The technology outage on Friday disrupted operations at airports including Los Angeles International Airport, as well as banks, health systems and government agencies, and was caused by a flawed update from CrowdStrike, a Texas company that provides cybersecurity software to a range of clients around the world.
CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz apologized in a statement on Friday, saying the company moved quickly to resolve the issue and was “focused diligently on restoring customer systems as our top priority.” Kurtz said the issue was not the result of a cyberattack.
Beyond LAX, other medical facilities are also responding to the impacts. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center said in a statement on Friday that while the facility remains open, “our teams will be actively working through the weekend to resolve any remaining issues in preparation for the start of the week.”
Kaiser Permanente similarly said the outage affected some of its systems but that its hospitals and offices remained open. The company said that in some circumstances, it activated backup systems to ensure access to medical records and to ensure patient care was not interrupted.
“We are making steady progress in bringing our systems back online. We will continue our efforts over the weekend and strive to return service levels to normal as much as possible by Monday morning,” Providence Health System said in a statement Saturday morning, urging people not to delay necessary care.
A spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Management said Saturday that “911 systems, public safety communications and life-saving critical infrastructure were not affected” after the outage.
