Dover crossing in chaos as Microsoft Crowdstrike worldwide IT outage sparks travel nightmare for second day

Carnage caused by a global IT meltdown continues today with hundreds of Britons stuck in queues for the ferry crossing at Dover.

On the first day of the school summer holidays, severe disruption remains at airports, with the chaos spreading to the south of England harbour.

It is thought those with flight cancellations have made their way to the sea border in the hope of finding alternative transport to the continent.

Authorities have urged those without a booking for the ferry today to stay away.

The mass IT outage was caused by a flaw in an update rolled out by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike on Friday.

While a fix to the bug was deployed, CrowdStrike’s chief executive has warned it will take “some time” for systems to be fully restored.

Every Microsoft Windows system will need to be manually rebooted in order to fix the issues caused.

The Port of Dover said this morning that “hundreds of displaced” airport passengers had travelled to the coast this morning.

Chief executive Doug Bannister added: “We operate a turn up and go system here.

“However, we do insist you have a [booking] on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down.

“The greater visibility we have the better. But we are here to service people who want to travel.

“So I would say to displaced airport passengers ‘come on down. We have the capacity’.”

P&O Ferries added on social media: “We understand that high traffic volumes are causing congestion on the roads leading to and within the port.

“Rest assured we will honour your booking and transfer you to the next available crossing upon arrival at our check in booths.”

Aviation analytics company Cirium said 6,855 flights, or 6.2 per cent of all those scheduled, were cancelled globally on Friday.

It added that 1,639 flights had been cancelled globally as of 10am on Saturday, including 23 flights departing from UK airports, equating to 0.9 per cent of all scheduled UK departures, as well as 25 arrivals into the UK.

As well as the issues at ferry crossings and airports, the system outage is continuing to cause problems for the UK’s rail network.

Ticket machines have failed with customers unable to make purchases or pick up pre-bought passes, and some automated barriers have also stopped being able to scan QR codes.

Professor Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said that while “the worst” of the outage was over, countries would “have to learn to cope” with future flaws.

The NCSC said affected organisations should “put in place vendor mitigations”.

It added it was also warning about “an increase in related phishing” as “opportunistic malicious actors seek to take advantage of the situation”.