Global CrowdStrike outage upends vacations, cancels surgeries after causing chaos

Long-awaited summer vacations and even surgeries were thrown into turmoil Friday after a global tech outage that crippled industries worldwide forced furious Americans to miss flights and camp out overnight in airports.

“This is bulls–t,” Gary Robertson, a frustrated Queens father, raged at JFK Airport early Friday after learning his family’s flight was among the hundreds canceled nationwide due to the unprecedented glitch.

In the Big Apple alone, LaGuardia Airport had axed 60 flights and delayed more than 100, while JFK travelers on dozens of flights were hit with lengthy delays and 38 canceled flights by mid-morning as the fallout from the global crisis spread.

An agitated Robertson — who was flanked by his wife, the two kids and piles of luggage — had been scheduled to fly down to Orlando, Fla., where they then planned to set off on a cruise vacation.

“[It’s] extremely frustrating when you’re schlepping all the bags and you got two young kids, you know, and obviously you work hard to plan your trip to go away and mellow out a little bit — and then you got to deal with more aggravation,” Robertson, a 42-year-old salesman, told The Post.

“It’s not how I wanted this day to start out.”

“It’s a little chaotic,” he added of the scenes inside the airport. “Some of the people you talk to in lines are definitely very frustrated because they’re definitely in the same predicament.”

Meanwhile, Matt Jordan, a music professor left stranded at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, feared he and his partner may miss their Alaska cruise, which sets sail on Saturday, after their travel plans were upended by the outage.

“We’re gonna have to fly today to make it onto our cruise,” he said, adding, “I’m assuming that most of the people who are flying in for this cruise won’t be able to make it.”

The pair were set to travel from Indianapolis to Seattle, via Atlanta, but were rerouted to Minneapolis amid the chaos.

He said the airlines were scrambling to find food and toiletries for passengers forced to camp out overnight in the terminal.

“We’re only dealing with what little chips and snacks they could find available,” he said. “They did give out some kind of toiletry bags that had deodorant and toothpaste and things like that in there.”

“Then they handed out pillows and blankets as much as they could,” Jordan continued. “The airline’s been as helpful as possible, kind of knowing the limitations of what the situation is and what they have available here at the airport.”

The widescale disruptions were triggered when US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike deployed a faulty software update to computers running Microsoft Windows overnight — wreaking havoc on the systems that airlines, hospitals and a slew of other industries rely on.

“It just amazes me that one company with a software update can screw up the whole world. They don’t have a backup plan,” Tim Henigin, 71, told The Post from Pittsburgh International Airport, where he was trying to set off on his Italian vacation.

“It’s a mess,” his wife, Jackie, added.

Katie Mayo, 43, of Los Angeles, was bracing for lengthy delays out of Pittsburgh, where she’d been visiting family.

“It seems like there’s too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” she told The Post. “It’s going to make for a long day.”

“I told him I’ll wake him up when we can finally go,” Mayo said of the stranger sleeping on the floor next to her.

In addition to the hundreds of flight delays across the US, massive lines quickly formed at airports as airlines lost access to their check-in and booking services at the peak of summer travel.

At Baltimore’s airport, Rose Geffrard — a nurse traveling with her 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter to a cousin’s wedding in Boston — said she spent nearly two hours waiting in a long line to get paper tickets as Spirit Airlines personnel looked up their names on a paper manifest.

Airline personnel had to rifle through a printed passenger manifest before issuing the tickets and then consult a printed seating chart to check they weren’t double-assigning seats.

The drawn-out process led to long waits, Geffrard said.

Meanwhile, the effects of the outage weren’t just crippling the travel industry.

The Mass General Brigham health care system in Massachusetts also canceled all previously scheduled non-urgent surgeries, procedures and medical visits Friday “due to the severity” of the global IT outage.

“Mass General Brigham remains open to provide care to patients with urgent health concerns in our clinics and emergency departments, and we continue to care for all patients currently receiving care in our hospitals,” they said in a post on X.

Mass General Brigham operates two of the US’s top-ranked hospitals — Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many patients had been affected.

With Post wires