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One reason I put charts for both absolute numbers of flights and percentage change is to help understand the larger context. Those relative upticks happened just before CrowdStrike hit, so around midnight Eastern time, when traffic was already very low. So a 25% increase might be 12 extra flights taking off in the U.S. in an hour. There's plenty of noise, for sure, and looking at absolute numbers and percent change together can help give you a sense of what was going on. Looking at two days worth of data is probably enough to give you the main themes of the CrowdStrike impact, but not enough to explain every variation.

It was widely reported to be the busiest travel day for quite a long time, which compounded problems.

Yeah, shouldn't have been too hard to add a couple more weeks so you at least get an idea about variance.