Major IT outage hits airlines, companies worldwide

Microsoft users worldwide, including banks and airlines, reported widespread outages on Friday, hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services. In India, several air carriers, including IndiGo, Akasa, and SpiceJet, experienced disruptions in their check-in systems due to issues with Microsoft Azure. According to some passengers, they were issued handwritten boarding passes due to the network issue.

Adani Airports, which operates airports in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Mangaluru, Jaipur, Guwahati, and Thiruvananthapuram, issued a statement saying: "A global IT outage has affected operations, impacting flights nationwide. During this time, booking, check-in, access to boarding passes, and flights are likely to be affected."

"Our systems across the network are impacted by an ongoing issue with Microsoft Azure, resulting in increased wait times at our contact centers and airports. You may experience slower check-ins and longer queues. We are working relentlessly to restore stability and normalcy. Our digital team is coordinating closely with Microsoft Azure to resolve these issues swiftly," IndiGo stated on X. Air India Express, Akasa Airlines and SpiceJet also reported challenges.

The cause, exact nature and scale of the outage was unclear. Microsoft appeared to suggest in its X posts that the situation was improving but escalating outages were still being reported around the world hours later.

The website DownDectector, which tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded growing outages in services at Visa, ADT security and Amazon, and airlines, including American Airlines and Delta. News outlets in Australia reported that airlines, telecommunications providers and banks, and media broadcasters were disrupted as they lost access to computer systems. Some New Zealand banks said they were also offline.

Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion and that they were observing a positive trend in service availability. The company did not respond to a request for comment. It did not explain the cause of the outage further.

US airlines majorly hit
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, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, Allegiant and SunCountry had earlier reported outages that affected operations. Frontier said late 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 a comment.

Frontier cancelled 147 flights on Thursday and delayed 212 others, according to data tracker FlightAware. 45% of Allegiant aircrafts were delayed, while Sun Country delayed 23% flights, the data showed. The companies did not give details on the number of flights impacted.

Microsoft said 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. Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services. Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Banks
Australian outages reported on the site included the banks NAB, Commonwealth and Bendigo, and the airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas, as well as internet and phone providers such as Telstra. News outlets in Australia including the ABC and Sky News were unable to broadcast on their TV and radio channels, and reported sudden shutdowns of Windows-based computers.

An X user posted a screenshot of an alert from the company Crowdstrike that said the company was aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to its Falcon Sensor platform. The alert was posted on a password-protected Crowdstrike site and could not be verified. Crowdstrike did not respond to a request for comment.
(With inputs from Reuters, AP via PTI.)