A Microsoft cloud computing suite failure on Friday caused disruptions for businesses all around the world. Flights were grounded, news sources were unable to transmit updates, and trading house operations were impeded. There have been reports of outages in Australia, the US, the UK, and India that have affected everything from government facilities and airports to banks, media outlets, and financial exchanges.
The past 24 hours, disruptions for Microsoft services, such as the cloud computing program Azure and the office suite Microsoft 365, were recorded worldwide. 1,751 outages were recorded in the US.
On its website, Microsoft stated that a portion of its customers were having problems with several Azure services in the Central US area when the outage began on Thursday at around 6 p.m. ET. Microsoft also said that it was looking into a problem that was affecting a number of Microsoft 365 services and apps.
Since then, Microsoft has announced that certain of its services are live.US airlines cancel flights due to a communication problem. Less than an hour after Microsoft fixed its cloud services failure that affected many low-cost carriers, major US carriers, including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines, announced ground stops on Friday morning due to communication problems.
It was not immediately apparent if the request to halt aircraft takeoff had anything to do with the previous Microsoft cloud outage. Along with American and Delta, flights operated by UAL and Allegiant Air were also canceled. The FAA did not reply to Reuters’s request for comment right away.
Allegiant, Sun Country, and Frontier Airlines are low-cost carriers that had previously encountered operational disruptions. Frontier announced late on Thursday that the ground halt has been removed and that it was in the process of starting up again.
Prior to this, Frontier had reported that a “major Microsoft technical outage” had momentarily disrupted its operations, and Sun Country had stated—without identifying the supplier—that a third-party vendor had impacted its booking and check-in services.
US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg stated that the agency will hold Frontier and all other airlines “to their responsibilities to meet the needs of passengers” and that the department was keeping an eye on the flight cancellation and delay concerns at the airline.
The Microsoft Azure issue is the reason why the Allegiant website is temporarily offline, according to a statement released by the Nevada-based airline to CNN. Allegiant did not reply to Reuters’s request for comment right away.
FlightAware, a data collector, reports that Frontier canceled 147 flights on Thursday and delayed 212 other ones. According to the data, Sun Country delayed 23% of flights while Allegiant delayed 45% of its aircraft. The number of affected flights was not disclosed by the companies.
