More like Delaybor Day.
US travelers were stranded at Newark Liberty International Airport on Labor Day after an equipment outage caused numerous flight delays and cancellations.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it had implemented ground delays at the New Jersey hub on Monday afternoon due to a “radar issue,” NBC New York reported.
According to Flight Aware, this resulted in over 456 delays and 64 cancellations of both inbound and outbound flights.
Some airlines were even forced to divert planes to other airports while many passengers learned of the delays while seated in planes on the runway, Pix11 reported.
“They said there was a problem at Newark Airport, to which we deboarded the plane, and they told us to wait a half an hour,” traveler Cari Geffner, who was stranded in Maine with her husband Michael, told Fox 5 New York.
“We are on a four o’clock flight, and they finally canceled it at 7:30,” Michael Geffner lamented.
Others took to X to vent, with one passenger claiming they were “sleeping at Newark airport with zero compensation for hotels or food.”
“How does this happen? On a holiday — also unbelievable,” a second peeved passenger railed.
As of Tuesday morning, many travelers were still grounded at Newark.
The FAA urged stranded travelers to monitor fly.faa.gov for updates.
Coincidentally, the Transportation Security Administration expects this Labor Day to be the busiest on record.
This mishap comes just over a month after the international tech crash that occurred after US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sent out a faulty overnight software update to computers running Microsoft Windows.
The outage crippled businesses, hospitals and airports.
Around 23,750 flights were delayed or canceled worldwide as a result.
Crowdstrike later admitted that the meltdown was caused by a bug in its quality control system – the very tool meant to prevent such mistakes from happening in the first place.
