Sun Country: ‘We were literally handwriting boarding passes’ during CrowdStrike outage

Sun Country Airlines lost $1.5 million last month when a flawed software update resulted in the cancellation of thousands of flights worldwide.

It’s far less than the half billion-dollar cost to Delta Air Lines, the largest carrier at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, but the CrowdStrike outage still put immense pressure on Sun Country, airline leaders said during a call with media Friday following the company’s second quarter earnings report.

Greg Mays, Sun Country’s chief operating officer, said about 11,000 of the airline’s customers were grounded July 19 when the company was forced to cancel 68 flights, or half its scheduled flights that day. The airline had lost access to the system that controls boarding and departures, and to try to keep up, workers had to go back to manual processes, Mays said.

“We were literally handwriting boarding passes,” he said.

The system was back up and running by 6:30 p.m., allowing Sun Country to push some of its late evening flights out. In the next two days, the airline completed all scheduled flights, Mays said. Sun Country tried to proactively cancel flights so passengers didn’t have to leave their home or hotel for the airport.

“We were, I’d say, largely successful with that,” Mays said.

Two days after the outage, Sun Country flights were nearly full “because we were recovering other passengers from other airlines” that cancelled flights, CEO Jude Bricker said. That continued over the next two or three days, allowing Sun Country to nearly recoup its losses.

“It was probably close to neutral,” Bricker said.

Sun Country already was trying to recover from aircraft availability problems in late June caused by maintenance issues, Mays said. Of the company’s fleet of 44 passenger planes, three required extended maintenance. The airline was able to put two spare planes into operation on peak days, but the loss of the planes still affected the number of passengers it could transport, leading to cancelled flights, he said.

The company reported $254 million in revenue for its second quarter, a 2.6% decrease when compared to the same three-month period in 2023. In a call with analysts, Bricker said the June operational challenges at MSP reduced passenger revenue between $1 million and $1.5 million.

In addition to fewer dollars from passenger flights, fuel and landing fees and other expenses continued to eat into the company’s quarterly profits, with net income falling 91% from the year-ago period.

Sun Country reported net income of $1.8 million, or 3 cents per share, compared with $20.6 million, or 35 cents per share, for its second quarter in 2023. The company’s stock gained just over a half percentage point in value Friday morning.