A recent global IT failure impacting major airports and airlines will cause disruption and delays to air cargo services that could take days or even weeks to fully resolve.

The IT failure, which occurred on July 19, affected Microsoft systems and grounded or delayed thousands of flights at the world's largest air freight hubs in Europe, Asia, and North America.

Niall van de Wouw, chief airfreight officer at Xeneta, noted that the global IT outage triggered by cyber security company Crowdstrike's software update would heavily impact the air cargo industry. 

"Air supply chains are highly complex, so a global disruption of this scale could have a severe impact. Planes and cargo are not where they are supposed to be, and it will take days or even weeks to fully resolve," he said.

The latest data from Xeneta, the ocean and air freight rate benchmarking and intelligence platform, showed that air cargo supply chains were already under pressure prior to the IT failure.

Global demand increased by 13% in June compared to the same month in 2023, continuing an upward trend seen throughout 2024 to date.

At the same time, air freight supply has increased by a much lesser 3% year-on-year.

The Xeneta report noted that the result is less available capacity in the market and increasing costs for shippers, with the global air cargo spot rate climbing 17% year-on-year in June to stand at US$2.62 per kg.

"Shippers already had concerns about air freight capacity due to huge increases in demand in 2024, driven largely by the extraordinary growth in e-commerce goods being exported from China to Europe and the US," said Van de Wouw.

He noted that available capacity in the market is already limited, so airlines will struggle to move cargo that should have been moved today to the next day.

"These incidents can take three times as long to resolve as the length of time they last, but that is very much dependent on the scale of the IT failure and the market conditions at the time it occurs," Van de Wouw further said.

He also observed that the most recent incident exposes another vulnerability in the world's supply chains.

"We have seen in 2024 how vulnerable our global maritime supply chains are following the disruption caused by conflict in the Red Sea," he said.

"Now we see vulnerabilities exposed in our air supply chains due to IT failure. We benefit greatly from technology and have grown dependent on it – but there is a price to pay when things go wrong," Van de Wouw added.