■ Auto rental company Hertz has filed for bankruptcy protection.

Hertz filed for bankruptcy protection Friday, unable to withstand the coronavirus pandemic that has crippled global travel and with it, the heavily indebted 102-year-old car rental company’s business.

The Estero, Florida-based company’s lenders were unwilling to grant it another extension on its auto lease debt payments past a Friday deadline, triggering the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

Hertz and its subsidiaries will continue to operate, according to a company release.

Hertz’s principal international operating regions and franchised locations are not included in the filing, the statement said.

By the end of March, Hertz Global Holdings Inc. had racked up more than $24 billion in debt, according to the filing, with only $1 billion of available cash.

Starting in mid-March, the company — whose car-rental brands include Dollar and Thrifty — lost all revenue when travel shut down due to the coronavirus.

The company made “significant efforts” but couldn’t raise money on the capital markets, so it started missing payments to creditors in April, the filing said. Hertz has also been plagued by management upheaval, naming its fourth CEO in six years in May.

“No business is built for zero revenue,” former CEO Kathryn Marinello said on the company’s first-quarter conference call in May. “There’s only so long that companies’ reserves will carry them.”

In late March, Hertz shed 12,000 workers and put another 4,000 on furlough, cut vehicle acquisitions by 90 percent and stopped all nonessential spending.

But the cuts came too late to save Hertz, the nation’s No. 2 auto rental company founded in 1918 by Walter L. Jacobs, who started in Chicago with a fleet of a dozen Ford Model Ts. Jacobs sold the company, called Rent-A-Car Inc., to John D. Hertz in 1923.