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NRI Pulse team member trapped in airport nightmare amid global tech outage

BY VEENA RAO

UPDATED AT 10.40 AM EST ON JULY 20, 2024: NRI Pulse team member Jyothsna Hegde’s flight from Atlanta to Austin finally took off around 6:45 p.m. on Friday. Despite having only a 10-minute window, she managed to catch her connecting flight to London. She is now on her rebooked flight from London to Bengaluru.


Atlanta, GA, July 19, 2024: NRI Pulse City News Editor Jyothsna Hegde has been trapped in what she describes as an ‘airport nightmare’ at the Hartsfield Jackson International Airport since the afternoon of Thursday, July 19, 2024, due to a Microsoft tech outage that disrupted flights and stranded passengers worldwide.

Hegde was on her way to Bangalore via London on flight, DL30, with code sharing with Virgin Atlantic 4044, which was scheduled to take off at 5:10 PM on Thursday. After a delay, passengers finally boarded around 7:00 PM. However, instead of taking off, the aircraft merely moved from one gate to another.

“I must have dozed off for a while because when I woke up, I was puzzled to see other aircraft outside the window. That’s when I realized we were still on the ground,” she said.

Photos by Jyothsna Hegde.

Passengers remained on the plane for five hours during which no food was served.

“We were tired and hungry. When some passengers requested food, the flight crew cited FAA regulations that prohibit food from being served after a 5-hour delay,” Hegde said. Despite fresh food arriving late in the night, passengers were asked to deboard before it could be served.

At the gate (which was at the domestic terminal), chaos ensued as a single crew member struggled to handle 300 passengers.

Around 12:30 or 1:00 AM, after additional crew assistance arrived, passengers were offered hotel vouchers for accommodations in Norcross and Buckhead. Some families with young children accepted the vouchers, but Hegde chose to stay back because the accommodation offered was quite a distance from the airport.

Hegde could not return home to the comfort of her own bed because she had bags that were checked in.

Eventually, Hegde was rebooked on a 3:30 PM flight, turning her originally planned two-leg trip into a three-leg journey: Atlanta to Austin, Austin to London, and London to Bengaluru. But, as of 6.15 pm EST on Friday, her flight has still not taken off from Hartsfield Jackson Airport. Exhausted, she is eager to reach Bengaluru to see her father.

Even at 9 AM this morning, every food place had long lines. “It took me over an hour to get coffee from Starbucks,” Hegde said.

According to FlightAware, a flight tracking database, more than 650 flights were delayed, and over 100 were canceled.

Microsoft attributed the outage to a recent update from American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, citing a “configuration change in a portion of its Azure backend workloads” as the primary cause. This led to connectivity failures between storage and compute resources, affecting downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.

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