DULUTH — Flights in and out of the Duluth International Airport on Friday were not immune from an early morning tech outage that plagued industries worldwide, including airlines, finance and health care.
Mark Papko, director of operations at the Duluth Airport Authority, told the News Tribune that as of 3 p.m. Friday, every flight had been delayed to some degree, but no cancellations were recorded.
Papko said airport systems were unaffected by the outage as the issue was within internal systems for each airline. Delays of several hours were reported Friday morning but have been improving throughout the day as airlines catch up, he said.
“It’s getting better and improving kind of hour by hour as (airlines) get more and more online,” Papko said. “But the larger hubs are definitely in a little bit worse shape than Duluth.”
Delta Air Lines offers daily flights between Duluth and the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, and United Airlines offers daily flights between Duluth and Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Sun Country has also offered a twice-weekly flight between Duluth and Fort Myers in the winter and spring.
Departures of all flights out of Minneapolis and Chicago are averaging over 30 minutes late while airborne aircraft are arriving an average of 47 minutes late to Minneapolis,
a website that tracks flight information.
Papko said he expects the delays to continue throughout the day Friday, but that it should improve for the weekend.
“My hope is that through the nighttime … the larger airline system has time to breathe, catch up, and then I expect full return to normal operations for the most part in the morning,” Papko said. “But that will be dependent on how the airlines respond, and how well that can recover, especially through their major hubs.”
, the issue originated with a software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that has since been fixed.
Jimmy Lovrien covers environment-related issues, including mining, energy and climate, for the Duluth News Tribune. He can be reached at jlovrien@duluthnews.com or 218-723-5332.
window.fbAsyncInit = function() FB.init(
appId : '929722297680135',
xfbml : true, version : 'v2.9' ); ;
(function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = " fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); (document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));