x
Breaking News
More () »

Tough travels for people in Luzerne County after cyber outage

Newswatch 16's Jack Culkin spoke to flyers who felt the impact even hours after it was fixed.

LUZERNE COUNTY, Pa. — Many of the travelers say it's been a long day of delays, cancellations, and waiting, even after a fix was made for the batch of bad computer codes on Friday.

"A lot of delays because of the Microsoft problems they had this morning, so it took me twice as long to get home," said James Carlson of Wyoming.

James Carlson was one of the many travelers ending their day at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport after struggling to fly home due to a worldwide cyber outage caused by a flawed software update. Originally starting Thursday night, industries across the country lost access to online services, leaving thousands stranded.

"I dropped a friend off at the airport last night in Phoenix, and he canceled his trip 'cause they just shut down," said Dylan Hatch from Phoenix.

"I got to the airport at 6 a.m., and I'm flying into Scranton now," said Jacqueline Lesser of Philadelphia.

Planning to fly from Chicago to Philadelphia, Jacqueline Lesser was forced to change route to Scranton after her first flight was canceled, a fate she shared with many others.

"There was another couple in front of me who was also on the flight to Philly. The flight was canceled, and they were going to take an 11 a.m. flight; I decided to take this flight. They were on this flight with me, so their second flight got canceled," added Lesser.

"I was originally in Wisconsin, and people were scrambling to get their flights and make other arraignments if they needed to," said Heather Barrows of Montgomery.

After navigating crowded airports all day, Heather Barrows is almost home after an unexpected 16 hours of traveling.

"We rely on the computers, we rely on different technology a lot, and without that, it's sometimes scary," added Barrows.

This was not a cyber attack but an outage due to faulty software. Crowd Strike, the software company responsible has issued a fix and released a statement apologizing to those affected.

Before You Leave, Check This Out