MINNETONKA, Minn. — Getting the Stanley Cup isn't easy. Just ask every NHL player — past and present.
A grueling seven-month schedule, followed by four seven-game series — typically at the highest intensity — but once the cup is hoisted, the rest is supposed to be easy.
Nope. Not for Minnesota.
Kyle Okposo, a member of the champion Florida Panthers, was scheduled to bring the coveted cup to the Pagel Activity Center in Minnetonka. Okposo was born in St. Paul and played hockey at Shattuck-St. Mary's before attending the University of Minnesota.
One of the great traditions with the Stanley Cup is that each member of the team has a day with the trophy. Friday was supposed to be Okposo's, but a global technology outage foiled those plans.
"Due to flight delays, the Stanley Cup event scheduled for today has been postponed," officials at the Pagel Activity Center posted on social media. "Stay tuned for possible reschedules."
"I'm crushed," Okposo told The Athletic's Michael Russo, adding that they're working to figure out a way to get the cup to The State Of Hockey.
A number of major airlines in the U.S. and around the globe were grounded completely for several hours Friday because of the outage, leaving millions of travelers stranded. According to the Associated Press, the FAA said around 1:45 a.m. Eastern Friday that United, American, Delta, and Allegiant had all been grounded by the outage, although the airlines began saying Friday morning that service was resuming.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said Friday that the issue is not a security incident or cyberattack. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz posted on social media platform X that the company “is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
