There's a man in Florida who wants to propose to his girlfriend while they're on a beach vacation. He can't get the engagement ring before they fly in from New England, but that doesn't seem like a big deal: His girlfriend's daughter, Nicole, is coming to Florida to celebrate her mother's birthday, so he asked her to get the ring before the flight.
In an ideal world, Nicole — who didn't want to reveal her last name lest her mother find out about the surprise proposal — would fly to Florida on Friday to deliver the ring, and then her mother and her new fiancé would live happily ever after. But a global crowdstrike glitch turned this idyllic weekend into a plot point in a weird romantic comedy.
Across the world, thousands of people like Nicole had their plans disrupted by the outage, which took down countless computers running Microsoft Windows. In the airline industry alone, more than 3,500 flights were canceled and another 31,000 were delayed, according to the FlightAware tracking system.
“We were a little worried [transporting the engagement ring] Either way, it just adds another layer of complexity,” Nicoll told TechCrunch.
Now, the Delta flight she was scheduled to take with her husband early Friday morning has been postponed until at least 3 p.m. ET.
“I was texting [my mom]' And she was like, 'Oh my god, the airport is in trouble. Don't come, it's OK, just cancel the flight,'” Nicole says. “And I was like, 'Yeah, I have to go.'”
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the outage was caused by a flaw in a CrowdStrike content update for Windows. He denied the possibility of a cyberattack or security incident, but customers are concerned that a flawed update could cause so much disruption. CrowdStrike's website says that about 60% of Fortune 500 companies and half of Fortune 1,000 companies use CrowdStrike.
US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on CNBC that while the cause of the problem had been identified, travelers would still experience ripple effects from the outages.
“These flights are so tight and back-to-back that the effects could be felt throughout the day, even after the underlying causes have been addressed,” Buttigieg said.
For now, all Nicole and the thousands of other inconvenienced travelers can do is wait.
“Tomorrow is her birthday and he was probably going to propose then,” she said. “We don't know. It's literally changing by the hour at this point.”
We'll update this story once we know if true love can overcome the technical glitches and how the proposal went.