How tech outage is impacting Las Vegas casinos, airport

Harry Reid International Airport was full of tired, frustrated passengers as airlines faced tech outages Friday morning.

Flight Aware reported Friday morning that up to 225 flights were delayed and 81 canceled at the Las Vegas airport, while 27,075 flights were affected worldwide. American Airlines, Spirit Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Frontier Airlines and Southwest Airlines were all impacted.

By midmorning, FlightAware said there were 81 flight delays and 27 cancellations today at Reid while there were 30,163 worldwide and 5,728 delays within the United States.

At Reid airport, people slept on the floor with their luggage nearby and waited in long lines.

The flight disruptions appeared to be part of a global problem that has caused chaos for businesses and even led to Las Vegas’ NBC affiliate dropping local programming for hours late Thursday and early Friday.

George Kurtz, the CEO of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which has been linked to the outage, said on X that the company was dealing with a defect in an update for Microsoft Windows systems. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said.

Elsewhere in the valley

Last night, slot machines were down at Green Valley Ranch in Henderson, but operations at casinos on the Las Vegas Strip and downtown appeared normal Friday morning.

All gaming and hotel operations are normal at the Wynn, Encore, Venetian, Palazzo and Treasure Island. A slot tech at TI who has been on shift since 3 a.m. said nothing unusual happened at the property all night.

Caesars Palace operations are normal, with no waits to cash out. A small number of slot machines are down. The line at the front desk line is short and moving. Bars, restaurants and shops appear to be normal and operating.

The Sphere was temporarily affected by the outage or another issue early Friday, according to two Wynn employees who saw a blue screen with an error message on their way into work this morning.

At Red Rock Resort in Summerlin, video screens around the casino displayed a message that said “The operating system on your PC failed to turn off properly and needs to be repaired.” The resort otherwise appeared to be operating normally.

Similarly, Dunkin Donuts and Lifetime Fitness in Summerlin were open and operating but dealing with system problems.The outage is impacting mobile ordering at Starbucks locations in the valley.

At the airport

“I feel like I was robbed,” said Crystal Gibbs, who had come from Los Angeles to get a connecting flight to Ohio and was in a line that was not moving.

She said she had arrived at the airport around 8 p.m. and had gotten no sleep.

“We don’t have a plan,” she said. “We don’t live here, so we’re trying to figure it out.”

Stacey and Kelvin Mitchell, who were visiting from Killeen, Texas, said their Allegiant flight had been canceled. Stacey Mitchell said they’ve been told they could get a refund and rebook the flight, but that they wouldn’t get another one Friday.

She said she was concerned because her husband, who has diabetes, is dependent on insulin and they only had enough for Friday. They also had a disabled son waiting at home with other family members.

The airline didn’t offer any voucher, she said, but they got a customer service number. The hold time was two hours, according to Mitchell. After a while, they were told they wouldn’t be able to get a flight until Monday.

“Little did we know that Microsoft had this much power,” she said.

Sylvia Wood, who had come from Richmond for the NAACP’s 115th National Convention and booked a flight for 10 p.m. Thursday so she could have time to gamble, said she had gotten on her Spirit flight but had been told to get off, initially because of a smell on the plane.

A Spirit employee told passengers to go home, she said, but “Everybody said we don’t live here.”

She was frustrated, because she said if she had known about the issues ahead of time, she could have stayed at her hotel. She was eventually able to get another flight on Spirit for about 9:30 p.m. Friday, but had to pay for it separately.

“I will never — and you can capitalize never — fly Spirit again,” she said.

Sue Ciresi, who was flying home to Indianapolis on a Spirit flight, had been at the airport since about 7 p.m. Thursday after a flight from Reno. Her flight was supposed to leave around 11 p.m. She called hotels, but they were booked or also had outages. She closed her eyes, but doesn’t think she got any sleep.

“It’s been miserable,” she said, adding that her children were worried about her. She said she’d been told her flight would be rebooked, but hadn’t gotten information about a new flight because of the technology problems.

On X, Spirit blamed the problems on a “third-party vendor” and said it could not rebook passengers because of the outage.

“We apologize to our Guests for the inconvenience,” the airline said.

Allegiant also said on X that the outage was the fault of a third-party software system.

“We are working diligently with our provider to resolve the issue,” Allegiant said.

Rick Berrett, who was trying to fly home to Salt Lake City via Delta, said he travels frequently and is used to delays. But he said the problems Friday stood out. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he said.

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X. Review-Journal staff writers Mick Akers and Richard N. Velotta contributed to this report.