NORFOLK, Va. — "I just cannot wait to get home."
Lauren Roberts Carter, with the Hampton Roads Chamber, was supposed to be back home in Norfolk Friday night after a weeklong conference with coworkers in Dallas, Texas.
But those travel plans changed rather quickly Friday morning when an outage at Microsoft caused global cyber outages, impacting airports all over the world.
Watch: A list of Hampton Roads organizations impacted by global technical outage
News 3's Jay Greene caught up with Roberts Carter over Zoom from her Dallas hotel room. She said she started seeing the news about the outage as soon as she woke up, and she tried to remain optimistic as she arrived at Dallas-Fort Worth airport.
"We're sitting at the gate and started hearing people asking questions from folks that were working at that gate. And they didn't have answers, no one really knew what was going on," she told Greene.
The optimism remained.
"There was an actual plane at our gate," she said. "We're like 'we have a plane, so we're gonna be fine. We're gonna get out of here in the next hour or two.'"
Fine? Not so much.
Watch: Airlines resume service after a massive global IT outage disrupted computer systems
She said she started getting alerts about delayed flights.
"At first, we were going to get delayed two hours, and then two hours turned into five hours," she said. "Then it turned into 'you're going to fly out around 7 p.m.'"
So Roberts Carter and her co-travelers started coming up with a Plan B...and Plan C, Plan D...you can see where we're going with this.
Watch: Nonstop flights to Puerto Rico begin at Norfolk International Airport
"Should we fly to Atlanta and just stay in Atlanta, and then maybe get a car and drive from Atlanta, up to Norfolk?" she said. "And then, of course, within that, like 30 minutes of trying to figure out what to do, the first flight gets canceled. So we knew at that point, we're not getting out of Dallas right now on that flight that we had originally planned."
Airline staff ended up informing everyone that there were no flights available out of Dallas.
"One of the things that was really interesting is a lot of the crews, including the pilot, they weren't able to get to Dallas from wherever they were coming in from. You might have a plane but you didn't have a crew, you didn't have a pilot," Roberts Carter told Greene. "So they kept saying, you know, 'we have the plane, we have no one to fly the plane or no crew assist'."
At one point, Flightaware.com reported more than 2,800 flight cancellations with at least 10,000 flights delayed.
Watch: Time lapse shows cancelled flights Friday
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg posted on social media Friday, reminding travelers that if their flight is canceled, they can request a cash refund if they don't want to travel.
If your flight is cancelled, and you choose not to travel, you do not have to accept a travel voucher. You can request a cash refund.
— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) July 19, 2024
Timothy Johnson, a professor in Hampton University's aviation sciences program said the issues were mainly centered around the airlines, but airports and their passengers were feeling the trickle-down.
"This outage has affected airliners, more than anything, with their databases and the systems," he told Greene.
Roberts Carter said she was finally booked a ticket home for Saturday night, and said being proactive is key in these types of situations.
"Rather than sitting around and keeping checking your phone for updates, it's actually getting logged into these different airlines and see what is going on to potentially get you to your destination."
