The IT failure that today grounded airline and airport operations around the world could take weeks to recover from, according to supply chain data firm Xeneta.
The disruption resulted in delays to thousands of flights and is understood to have been caused by a Microsoft IT outage triggered by a software update from cyber security company Crowdstrike.
Xeneta chief airfreight officer Niall van de Wouw said that supply chains are highly complex and a disruption of this scale could have a “severe impact”.
“Planes and cargo are not where they are supposed to be, and it will take days or even weeks to fully resolve,” he said.
He added that air cargo supply chains were already under pressure due to the double-digit increases in demand registered so far in 2024.
“Shippers already had concerns about air freight capacity due to huge increases in demand in 2024, driven largely by the extraordinary growth in e-commerce goods being exported from China to Europe and the US,” said van de Wouw in a press release.
“Available capacity in the market is already limited so airlines are going to struggle to move cargo tomorrow that should have been moved today.
“These incidents can take three times as long to resolve as the length of time they last, but that is very much dependent on the scale of the IT failure and the market conditions at the time it occurs.”
Supply chains have already been put under pressure this year by the Red Sea Crisis that has resulted in containerships needing to divert around southern Africa to avoid missile attacks in the Red Sea, he said.
“Now we see vulnerabilities exposed in our air supply chains due to IT failure. We benefit greatly from technology and have grown dependent on it – but there is a price to pay when things go wrong.”
Earlier today, freight forwarder Scan Global Logistics (SGL) said its IT systems were unaffected but warned of delays throughout the cargo supply chain in a market update.
It said that “the current global IT issues stemming from the CrowdStrike outage may cause bottlenecks and delays with several of our airline partners in the coming days. SGL systems are not affected by the issues”.
SGL added: “CrowdStrike reports that the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed. However, airlines and airports worldwide are reporting disruptions and flight cancellations.”
Global IT outage hits air cargo operations
