What we know about how the global tech outage is impacting North Texas

A widespread technology outage Friday caused problems and delays for airlines, hospitals, restaurants and emergency services in North Texas — some lingering hours after officials said a fix was underway.

Transport providers, businesses and governments on Saturday rushed to get all their systems back online.

The Austin-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the issue believed to be behind the outage, which affected Microsoft 365 apps and services, was not a security incident or cyberattack.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on X shortly before 5 a.m. “Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers.”

Here’s what we know.

Airports expect ‘significant’ delays, cancellations

The biggest continuing effect on Saturday was air travel. Carriers canceled thousands of flights on Friday and now have many of their planes and crews in the wrong place, while airports facing continued problems with checking in and security.

Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow, said it is busy but operating normally on Saturday. The airport said in a statement that “all systems are back up and running and passengers are getting on with their journeys smoothly.”

Things were different in Dallas on Friday. Heath Montgomery, vice president of marketing and communications at DFW International Airport, said Friday the airport anticipates significant delays and cancellations throughout the day. The airport is providing the latest information on its X account.

”Longer lines are also possible so allow extra time,” Montgomery said, adding that some concessions point of sales were impacted, but the airport is still determining the full scope of the outage.

The outage forced a nationwide grounding of the three largest U.S. air carriers, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Fort Worth-based American Airlines.

At Dallas Love Field, no significant delays or cancellations were reported Friday from the Federal Aviation Administration and the airport’s operations team, according to Lauren Rounds, an airport spokeswoman.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines operates 18 of Love Field’s gates at the airports but was not affected by the Microsoft system outage, according to the airline.

Globally, there were 110,000 scheduled commercial flights on July 19, Cirium reported. By 8 a.m. ET, there were 2,691 canceled flights globally and that number continues to grow.

In the U.S., more than 27,000 flights were scheduled from the country Friday, carrying up to 3.7 million travelers, including international departures, according to Cirium.

Emergency services remain operational

The Dallas Information and Technology Services Department was assessing the impact on city systems Friday morning and working to “remediate the issue as quickly as possible to all services,” according to city spokesman Rick Ericson.

“The city’s top priority is to maintain stability and minimize disruptions to Public Safety and Critical Infrastructure operations,” Ericson said in an email sent to The Dallas Morning News.

Ericson said calls from residents were coming into 911 and being dispatched to police officers, firefighters and paramedics.

Residents are urged to call 911 only to report emergencies, Ericson said, adding the Dallas 311 system is operating normally for residents who need to report non-emergency service requests.

Capt. Robert Borse, a Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman, said the outage caused “minimal” disruptions and confirmed that while the department had some administrative issues with internal systems, dispatch was fully functional.

The Dallas Police Department did not immediately respond to inquiries about whether or not their operations had been impacted.

The City of Plano reported on X it was having issues with some of its software and its non-emergency number, but said Plano 911 remained operational throughout.

The city updated about 6:15 a.m. that the non-emergency line was back in service.

Hospitals say patient care has not been affected

Cook Children’s Hospital said patient care is not being compromised by the outage, and said the bulk of their response has been “troubleshooting technology, rebooting computers and stabilizing systems.”

“We have emergency IT response teams on-site across the system and we are doing everything possible to ensure there is no interruption to patient care nor delays or inconveniences to families,” officials said in a statement.

Parkland Health was also affected by the IT outage this morning, a spokesperson for the hospital said, but all clinics remain open while the work to restore the affected computers.

“Parkland has downtime procedures in place for incidents such as this one and our team is working swiftly and methodically to minimize the operational impact,” the spokesperson said.

An official for the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council said some hospitals were affected by the outage, especially in the registration of patients. Most of the hospitals are back online, but some standalone clinics have not yet resolved the issue.

“Please know that clinical procedures, patient safety and overall patient care has not been adversely impacted,” their statement said. “The hospitals all have downtime procedures that are activated even if a manual registration process is needed. The downtime did impact a slowness in registration and a backlog for patients at some locations and we apologize for any patients that have longer wait times than normal.”

The statement also said any lingering administrative registration issues should be resolved as the day progresses.

In Austria on Saturday, a leading doctors organization said the global IT outage exposed the vulnerability of health systems reliant on digital systems.

“Yesterday’s incidents underscore how important it is for hospitals to have analogue backups” to safeguard patient care, Harald Mayer, vice president of the Austrian Chamber of Doctors, said in a statement on the organization’s website.

Driver license offices closed across the state

The Texas Department of Public Safety’s driver license offices were closed Friday across the state, according to William Lockridge, a DPS spokesman.

Lockridge said the department’s IT teams were working diligently to fix the issue, but said there is no estimate on when the offices will be able to reopen.

He urged customers to monitor DPS’ social media and the DPS website for updates.

Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT)

The Texas Department of Transportation said in an email to The Dallas Morning News that the Dallas and Fort Worth districts’ traffic monitoring network is working.

“While cameras are not accessible to the public at this time, crews at our traffic operations center can still monitor all cameras in the network and use that information to assist with emergency response,” the email said. “The department also is working on alternatives to be able to post information on overhead message boards should the outage continue.”

Some tools and resource on the TxDOT website were compromised, though, the email said. TxDOT said it added a banner on its homepage letting site visitors know that some applications and equipment had been affected, but they were working to restore them.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This is a developing story and will be updated.