Some Hawai‘i flights depart amid global tech outage; Hawaiʻi County IT Department acts swiftly to restore any affected systems

This story was updated at 12:38 p.m. July 19.

Airline communications systems impacted by a global technology outage that began Thursday are back online, and Hawaiʻi County only experienced minor issues because of swift actions by its information technology personnel.

Meanwhile, some health care facilities on the Big Island were unaffected while others in the state have experienced some issues.

The Hawai‘i Department of Transportation reports that some flights have been able to depart Hawai‘i airports while others were canceled or were rescheduled.

Travelers should check with their airline prior to going to the airport. Expect delays.

Three major airlines in particular, United, Delta and American, issued systemwide ground stops just before midnight Thursday after what has been called a massive computer, technology, information technology or internet outage, depending on the source, that affected airlines, airports, banks, media companies, health care organizations and several other industries around the globe.

Starbucks was also impacted, putting an even bigger damper on those stuck at airports or making their morning commutes, taking a gamble on if they’d work today or not.

Six flights at Kahului Airport on Maui, 6 flights at the Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport on the Big Island, 9 flights at the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Honolulu and 2 flights at Lῑhu’e Airport on Kaua‘i were impacted overnight, affecting more than 5,000 travelers.

The state Transportation Department increased security and extended concessions to accommodate impacted passengers.

All previously scheduled runway construction projects were canceled for the night to ensure runways were available when the airlines were ready to resume operations.

Anyone who has a flight today should check with their airline for their flight status before going to the airport.

“I was at Safeway at about 9:30 p.m. and they said their system wasn’t working for an hour so far,” said Melissa M Taylor of Hilo in an early morning reply to a comment about the worldwide outage from just after 11 p.m. Thursday in a Big Island Facebook group. “I couldn’t pay with debit. They only excepted cash or credit. Something is going on. Weird that we still have internet.”
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“Stuck in Chicago for same reason,” added Natalie Joan Alcain of Kealakekua shortly before 2 a.m. in the same thread.

Kamuela Chander was trying to make the situation a little more lighthearted with his reply.

“Go ahead and affect my bank account all you want,” he wrote in his reply. “You’ll be disappointed.”

Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, based in Austin, Texas, blamed what has been called the “largest IT outage in history” on a defective Microsoft Windows update.

“Today was not a security or cyber incident. Our customers remain fully protected,” said CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in a post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Kurtz said he and his firm understand the gravity of the situation and “are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption” the outage has caused.

“We are working with all impacted customers to ensure that systems are back up and they can deliver the services their customers are counting on,” he wrote. “As noted earlier, the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. There was an issue with a Falcon content update for Windows hosts.”

For the latest information, Kurtz directed the public to visit the CrowdStrike website and his posts on LinkedIn and X.

A preliminary investigation into any impacts to Hawaiʻi County found that only certain systems within the Hawaiʻi Police Department were affected.

However, there is no evidence to suggest the outage disrupted safety services, and the Police Department continues to function without interruption.

Swift response by the Hawaiʻi County Department of Information Technology resulted in all systems being restored to normal operating capacity by 10 p.m. last night, according to the mayor’s office.

“We are grateful to have an excellent team at the Department of Information Technology who were able to diagnose the problem and resolve it quickly,” said Mayor Mitch Roth. “Moving forward, we will continue to place an emphasis on security and redundancy to ensure maximum operational capacity of our county systems while realizing that these things sometimes happen.”

The mayor added that the county wishes safe travels and patience for those grounded last night because of the global outage as airlines begin to resume operations today.

The county will provide additional updates should other interruptions occur or any new information arises.

The aviation sector was hit particularly hard because of its sensitivity to timings.

A closely coordinated schedule and the ability operated by air traffic control means just one delay of a few minutes can throw off flights for the rest of the day.

According to a report by Inc.com, reports of the problem began late Thursday evening when Microsoft users started seeing their computers crash and displaying “the blue screen of death” — which means a PC running a Windows operating system has encountered a critical problem.

Despite CrowdStrike finding the problem and deploying a fix, millions of users aaround the world remained unable to reboot their computers. Slowly but surely, through the night and early morning, more and more people on social media have been saying their PCs are again working.

The outage comes just a two days after the announcement that the state’s initial proposal for the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment, or BEAD, program was approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration and Hawai‘i can now move forward with infrastructure projects to get 100% of the islands connected to reliable high-speed broadband internet.

Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, who is leading the charge to get Hawaiʻi connected, said the state’s information technology system remains unaffected by the global outage.

“My office has been in contact with our hospitals, banks, telecommunications and other key public services to which no significant impacts have been reported,” added Luke in a statement. “Currently, hospitals and health care systems have reported minimal impact. Residents with scheduled appointments should check with their medical providers before proceeding.”

Lynn Scully, marketing and communications manager at Queen’s North Hawaiʻi Community Hospital in Waimea on the Big Island, confirmed her facility was not impacted by the outage: “Thank goodness!” she said.

Tammy Mori Brownfield, senior director of communications and brand management at Kaiser Permanente Hawaiʻi, said all Kaiser locations statewide remain open for care and are continuing to monitor operations as the health care organization works to restore all affected systems.

“The global CrowdStrike IT outage that is affecting health care organizations and industries across the world is also affecting some Kaiser Permanente systems,” said a satement from Kaiser. “We activated our national command center at 4:30 a.m. [Pacific Standard Time] and Hawaiʻi has stood up its emergency operations center as well to address this incident.”

Kaiser is evaluating the impacts to its operations, computer systems and servers while coordinating recovery as needed. In some situations, backup systems have been activated to support continuous patient care and secure access to medical records.

Judy Donovan, regional director of marketing and strategic planning for the West Hawaiʻi Region of Hawaiʻi Health Systems Corp., which includes Kona Community Hospital and Kohala Hospital on the Big Island, said clinical operations were not directly affected by the global CrowdStrike software outage.

“[Hawaiʻi Health Systems Corp.], corporate networking and local hospital networking does not use CrowdStrike software as our cybersecurity vendor,” said Donovan. “We briefly had indirect ancillary systems offline, such as Microsoft nuance dragon dictation software, but no hospital clinical staff was inhibited from caring for their patients.”

Luke said residents and businesses experiencing outages should contact their service providers directly for further guidance.

“Our ability to stay connected online is critical, and we’ll continue to monitor this developing situation and provide support where needed,” the lieutenant governor said.