CrowdStrike-related flight effects could last for days — except at Southwest, which isn't remotely affected

The faulty CrowdStrike update that sent Microsoft systems into a blue screen of disaster early this morning and caused thousands of flight delays and cancellations could impact weekend travel too, according to analysts.

"My best estimate is that it's going to take three days to really recover from this," said Bill McGee, author of "Attention All Passengers" and senior fellow for aviation and travel at the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project. "Airlines love to outsource. And so they've outsourced all their IT, and what this shows today is the vulnerability of that ‘all the eggs in one basket’ type of thing."

Southwest (which said it's not impacted by the CrowdStrike issues) experienced an IT meltdown over the 2022 holiday weekend that took about 10 days to fully normalize. McGee said the issue lies largely with airlines' scheduling system.

"The system is designed for an absolutely perfect day, where from coast to coast, there's no bad weather, there's no air traffic control problems, there's no security problems, no broken plane, no sick pilots," he said. "So it's waiting to fall apart. Today is just one in a long line of examples where we saw that happen."

As of 4 p.m. Eastern time, flight cancellation rates at several major airlines were into the double digits, according to data from FlightAware.