Microsoft Cloud Outage Disrupts US Flights
A Microsoft cloud service outage in the Central U.S. on early Friday disrupted operations for several airlines, leading to flight cancellations and groundings. Microsoft confirmed the resolution of the issue after it impacted various Azure services.
Budget airlines Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and SunCountry experienced operational disruptions due to the outage. Frontier announced the resumption of normal operations late Thursday after a ground stop was lifted.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated that the department was monitoring the situation and would hold airlines accountable for passenger needs. Frontier attributed the disruption to a “major Microsoft technical outage,” while SunCountry cited a third-party vendor issue affecting booking and check-in systems, without naming Microsoft. Allegiant confirmed to CNN that its website was unavailable because of the “Microsoft Azure issue.”
FlightAware data revealed 147 Frontier flight cancellations and 212 delays on Thursday. Allegiant experienced delays for 45% of its flights, while Sun Country had 23% of its flights delayed. The airlines did not specify the total number of affected flights.
The outage, which began around 6 pm ET on Thursday, affected a subset of Microsoft’s customers using multiple Azure services in the Central U.S. region. Azure is a cloud computing platform used for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.
Microsoft also acknowledged investigating a separate issue affecting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.
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