PEARLAND, Texas – It’s never fun to have your flight impacted when you’re traveling, but a worldwide computer outage caused several people, including a Houston-area family, in limbo.
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Chad Laird, who spoke exclusively from Paris, France with KPRC 2 early Monday morning, was one of several travelers who had to wait hours until they could board the flight that would take him and his five other family members back home to Pearland.
While sitting patiently at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport a.k.a. Roissy Airport, Laird admits the delay wasn’t much of an inconvenience for him.
“I was kind of happy because I’m not working today, so I didn’t want to have to put up with the headaches,” he said. “But, you know, interestingly, there’s a lot of flights coming in and out. It looks like more of the U.S. domestic flights or, international flights are the ones that are having issues - specifically United [Airlines].”
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United also shared a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, acknowledging the outage and said it would be sharing a waiver with its travelers.
A third-party outage is impacting computer systems, including at United and many other organizations worldwide.
— United Airlines (@united) July 19, 2024
As we work to fully restore these systems, some flights are resuming. Many customers traveling today may experience delays.
We have issued a waiver to make it easier…
Despite traveling with so many people: his in-laws, his two children, and his wife, Laird noted there was nothing he could do but wait, and so that’s what they’d do.
“We’ve had a great trip, but, right now we’re just sitting around waiting,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll get some dues one way or the other, but, we’ll have to sit and wait and see.”
Fortunately, that patience paid off for Laird and his family because they fortunately made their flight! In a video shared on his Facebook, hours after his interview on KPRC 2 News Today, he and his family boarded their flight and were heading to Washington D.C. before a final flight back to Houston.
“Thanks for everybody, we’ll see you all in Texas!” Laird exclaimed.