There’s a man in Florida right now who wants to propose to his girlfriend while they’re on a beach vacation. He couldn’t get the engagement ring before he flew down from New England, but it didn’t seem like that big of an issue — his girlfriend’s daughter Nicole was planning to join them in Florida to celebrate her mom’s birthday, so he asked her to pick up the ring before her flight.
In a perfect world, Nicole — who didn’t want her last name to be published in case her mom finds out about the surprise proposal — would fly down to Florida on Friday and deliver the ring. Then, her mom and new fiance would live happily ever after. But a global CrowdStrike outage has turned this idyllic weekend into a plot point in a strange romantic comedy.
Around the world, thousands of people like Nicole have had a wrench thrown into their plans due to this outage, which knocked out countless computers running Microsoft Windows. In the aviation industry alone, over 3,500 flights have been canceled, with 31,000 more flights delayed, according to a tracker from FlightAware.
“We were a little bit nervous about [transporting the engagement ring] anyway, but then this just added a whole layer of complexity to it,” Nicole said.
Now, the Delta flight she planned to take with her husband early Friday morning has been delayed until 3 p.m. ET at least.
“I was texting [my mom], and she was like ‘Oh my god, it looks crazy at the airports, don’t come, it’s fine, just cancel the flight,’” Nicole said. “And I’m like, well, we can’t not come.”
The outage was caused by a defect in a CrowdStrike content update for Windows, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said. He has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack or security incident, but the ability of a faulty update to cause this much chaos has customers concerned. According to CrowdStrike’s website, nearly 60% of Fortune 500 companies and half of the Fortune 1,000 use CrowdStrike.
The U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said on CNBC that even though the root of the issue has been identified, travelers will still experience ripple effects from the outage.
“These flights, they run so tightly, so back-to-back, that even after a root cause is addressed, you can still be feeling those impacts throughout the day,” Buttigieg said.
For now, all that Nicole — and the thousands of other inconvenienced travelers — can do is wait.
“Her birthday is tomorrow, and he was probably gonna propose then,” she said. “We have no idea. It’s literally hour by hour at this point.”
We’ll update this story once we find out if true love can conquer technical failures how the proposal went.
