Fallouts continues for travelers following largest global IT outage

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) -- Travelers were left frustrated at RDU after a global IT outage that effected thousands of flights on Friday.

ABC11 met vocalist and saxophonist Keith Nieto on Friday night at RDU Airport. His flight was delayed from Dallas.

He landed in the nick of time to perform a live show at Enigma Nightclub.

"I thought I wasn't going to make it. We were going to cancel actually earlier, but I did manage to get on the plane and I'm here now," said Nieto. "I'm going to change in the car so I can go up on stage."

A Fayetteville couple also stalled trying to get to New Jersey for a Civil Service Exam for the Fire Department. Their United flight was pushed back to midnight.

"Well, they gave us like $15 each for food, so that was nice," said Cali Bogan. "And then other than that, they just mention updates about when it's going to leave."

Samuel Carter is a system architect with the Strategy Institute at North Carolina State University. He said Crowdstrike's software update impacted anyone using Microsoft 360, which included health systems to municipal agencies.

"So because this has actually happened where that update may break things from time to time, many organizations have adopted this concept with sort of an in -1 and -2 type of model, which simply just means, hey, I'm going to wait a little bit before I install that update just in case there was something wrong in it," said Carter.

He said that even though an update was shared an hour later, organizations were already locked out of their systems, and that was enough time for hackers to pop up.

"We started noticing the bad actors started creating these domains like CrowdStrike, physical CrowdStrike, update dot com. And they're trying to send phishing emails out to people that says, 'hey, we've got a fix for that big incident today.'"

Carter said IT departments have a solution but it requires fixing things one by one.

In the meantime, the Bogans hope to land in time for his big exam.

"Straight to the hotel, sleep probably for like an hour, because I got to take the test like an hour away," said Damon Bogan.