SFO Overwhelmed by Flight-Delay Chaos Right as Dreamforce Kicks Off, Nearly Half of Flights Delayed

The ‘perfect storm’ of an actual storm, government shutdown short-handedness, and a deluge of Dreamforce attendees left SFO all higgledy-piggledy on Monday, with thousands of travelers facing flight delays and reroutes.

The love-it-or-hate-it corporate-palooza Dreamforce conference officially kicked off Tuesday morning, which meant somewhere between 45,000 and 50,000 buttoned-down business types have descended upon San Francisco. Of course a few thousand of them are locals, but a large chunk are Salesforce software customers arriving in SF for the conference, and quite a few of those are international travelers.

Those who arrived Monday did not receive an ideal welcome at San Francisco International Airport. The Chronicle reports that nearly half of all SFO flights were delayed on Monday, largely due to yesterday's wild stormy weather, but also the ripple effects of the government shutdown on air traffic control. And this all hit on one of SFO’s biggest days of the year for business travel.

The Chron reports that 434 SFO flights were delayed Monday, and seven of them canceled. That information comes from the flight-tracking website FlightAware. SFO’s largest carrier United Airlines notched 142 delays, while Southwest Airlines stood out as having schedule disruptions on a full two-thirds of its flights.

As of Tuesday morning, things have certainly improved. As of about 11 am Tuesday morning, FlightAware’s MiseryMap (great name, by the way) showed just 28 SFO flight delays, and one cancellation.

The primary culprit was the weather, and it does fortunately appear that the worst of that is over. While the Chronicle is currently running the headline “California’s first big storm of the season is just getting started — here’s what’s next,” that is a statewide forecast noting that Southern California will be getting some pretty nasty storms this week. San Francisco is looking at maybe a few more scattered showers Tuesday, and pleasant weather for Thursday and Friday when many of those Dreamforcers will be heading home.

This is obviously more of a story because the delays happened when a huge chunk of the Dreamforce attendees were arriving. Their trips home are likely to be smoother. And for your peace of mind, we will note that SFO is among those airports refusing to play that bizarre Kristi Noem propaganda video, even if Salesforce CEO and newly-minted Trump lickspittle Marc Benioff would prefer we all bend to the administration’s wishes.

Related: United Airlines Tech Glitch Causes Almost 300 Flight Delays In and Out of SFO [SFist]

Image: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - OCTOBER 08: Planes line up on the runway to depart from San Francisco International Airport on October 08, 2025 in San Francisco, California. For a third straight day, flight delays are being seen across the country as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is experiencing continued airport staffing shortages due to the government shutdown. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)