Heaptalk, Jakarta — Southwest Airlines, a United States-based airline, said it survived the blue screen issue that affected companies worldwide for using the old version of Windows.
Southwest Airlines has been using Windows 3.1 since 1992. “We believe Southwest’s old technology makes it immune to the problems experienced by other airlines today,” the company stated on Wednesday (07/24).
A spokesperson for Southwest Airlines confirmed that they were not affected during the outage caused by CrowdStrike. This differs from other airlines that had to cease operations last Friday, such as Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and United Airlines, because they used the latest version of Windows.
On the other hand, a spokesperson for San Francisco Airport said dozens of flights were delayed, with some being canceled. Meanwhile, at Bay Oakland airport, only 10 flights were canceled, seven of which were Spirit Airlines. As of last Monday, analysts said several airlines were still recovering. Flight delays and cancellations were likely to continue throughout the weekend.
The Microsoft service outage impacted flight services, healthcare services, payment systems, and access to Microsoft’s own services. A report from The Guardian said CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, caused the issue. A malfunction occurred during the update of one of the Falcon Sensor software.
“This was not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated, and fixed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and ongoing updates on our website,” said George Kurtz, CrowdStrike CEO.
