Airlines at San Francisco International Airport were recovering Friday after a massive technology outage prompted ground stops and caused flight cancellations and delays worldwide.
According to the airport, about 85 flights were canceled Thursday night and early Friday morning.
At the United Airlines desk inside the international terminal, an entire bank of agents was working with customers whose travel plans were severely disrupted by the outage.
Manuel Negrette and Waverly Tan said they were about to take off for New Zealand, but they ended up spending four hours on the plane until crews released them after realizing the outage was a worldwide issue.
"They did say this is not just us, this is a global thing. You can do a search if you want on your phone, but it's not us. Get off the plane and sort out your own hotels and flights and then we'll reimburse you," Tan said.
They are among the lucky ones who were able to rebook their flights, but they won't leave until Sunday.
Anthony Cruz was trying to figure out how to get to Montreal, Canada.
"Nobody give me any information about what would be the easy way to return my flight," he said.
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At United baggage claim, there were rows and rows of passengers' suitcases. Customers were being told to find their baggage by looking for groups of bags that had been tagged to their final destinations.
While thousands of passengers were still feeling the effects into the day Friday, many others were not. Lots of flights had already resumed or were not affected at all, and most of the airport's systems were also not affected.
"Our IT group did a great job of kind of isolating and separating out that CrowdStrike issue from our larger operations, so our power, our systems, the AirTrain all continued to run throughout the night," airport spokesperson Doug Yakel said. "We're grateful for that."
While airport systems were largely unaffected, other airport entities besides airlines were, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection. According to a statement, they were experiencing processing delays because of the outage.
