Days after CrowdStrike outage, North Carolina woman still stuck at MSP Airport

MINNEAPOLIS — A North Carolina woman is still trying to get home after last week’s CrowdStrike outage waylaid her at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Melissa Vestal is from Raleigh, North Carolina, and went with a group of 16 other travelers to Anchorage, Alaska, for a cruise. On their way home, they got stuck at MSP due to widespread tech issues caused by a technical problem with global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

“We would like to go back to Raleigh, but we are open for whatever flight that we can actually fly home,” Vestal said.

Vestal said she actually got on a plane Sunday night and was on the tarmac, but they had to leave the plane after the crew announced the pilots could not fly.

“I’m hoping that we can find some luck today,” she said.

Vestal has a flight booked Monday, but others in her party have not been so lucky. She’s hoping to get home as soon as possible because she needs medications refilled, and she wants to see her family. 

Vestal said her experience with airport employees has been very positive — including with one worker who had been on the clock for 48 hours.

“We are just very appreciative, we’re calling them essential workers,” she said.

As of 7:30 a.m. Monday, more than 100 arriving and departing flights had been canceled at MSP.

CrowdStrike provides antivirus software to Microsoft for its Windows devices, and many industries globally — from banking to retail to health care — use the company’s software to protect against breaches and hackers. CrowdStrike said it has since identified the problem in its software and stressed this was not a cyber attack.