Baggage from United Airlines travelers began piling up in O’Hare Airport’s Terminal 2 as an “unprecedented” technology outage impacted flights and businesses worldwide Friday.
The airline was seeing carting away travelers’ luggage as flights were grounded due to the outage. Screens were put up to block views of the growing pile.
United was one of several major airlines impacted by the outage. Delta and American Airlines both also saw flights halted.
United Airlines said the outage was “impacting computer systems worldwide.”
Around 5:30 a.m. flights started resuming, but many remained delayed.
“A third-party outage is impacting computer systems, including at United and many other organizations worldwide. As we work to fully restore these systems, some flights are resuming,” the airline said, offering customers a waiver to change their travel plans and warning of ongoing delays.
A spokesperson for the airline did not respond to NBC Chicago’s request for comment on why luggage was being moved to a new terminal.
A worldwide Microsoft outage dramatically impacted a number of services from flights to banks and more for several hours early Friday morning.
Airlines and airports across the United States, Europe, Australia, India and elsewhere were reporting problems, with some flights grounded in Chicago and beyond. Retail outlets, banks, railway companies and hospitals in several parts of the world were also affected in what appeared to be an unprecedented internet disruption.
Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.”
On Friday, Microsoft said a majority of services were recovered, according to CNBC. However, the company noted some customers may still experience issues.
The chief executive of the cybersecurity company at the heart of the worldwide outage said it was working to fix a defect sent out in a Windows update.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on the social platform X. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”
Kurtz said there was a defect in a “single content update for Windows hosts.” Mac and Linux hosts were not affected.
The company referred customers to its support portal for updates.