Companies worldwide experienced interruptions amidst an outage of Microsoft’s cloud computing suites on Friday, with flights being grounded, news outlets unable to broadcast information, and operations in brokerage houses being hindered.
Outages have been reported in Australia, the US, the UK, and India, affecting institutions ranging from banks, media houses, and stock markets to government branches and airports.
According to DownDetector, outages for Microsoft services including the cloud computing programme Azure and office software Microsoft 365 were reported globally within the last 24 hours. In the US, 1,751 outages were reported.
Microsoft said on its website that its outage started at about 6 pm ET on Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region. Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Microsoft has since stated that some of its services are operational.
US carriers ground flights citing communication issue
Major US carriers including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines issued ground stops on Friday morning citing communication issues, less than an hour after Microsoft resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.
It was not immediately clear whether the call to keep flights from taking off were related to the earlier Microsoft cloud outage. Apart from American and Delta, UAL and Allegiant Air too grounded flights.
The FAA did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and SunCountry had earlier reported outages that affected operations.
Frontier said late on Thursday that it was in the process of resuming normal operations, and that the ground stop had been lifted.
Frontier said earlier that a “major Microsoft technical outage” hit its operations temporarily, while SunCountry said a third-party vendor affected its booking and check-in facilities, without naming the company.
US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said the department was monitoring the flight cancellation and delay issues at Frontier, adding that the agency will hold the company and all other airlines “to their responsibilities to meet the needs of passengers”.
“The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue,” Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN. Allegiant did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Frontier cancelled 147 flights on Thursday and delayed 212 others, according to data tracker FlightAware. Forty-five per cent of Allegiant aircraft were delayed, while Sun Country delayed 23pc of flights, the data showed. The companies did not give details on the number of flights impacted.