1,100 US flights canceled as Microsoft outage disrupts operations

Washington DC:

Air passengers in the United States faced delays, while some airlines halted flight operations as Microsoft-based computers stopped working following a global outage on Friday.

Many airports in the US suffered unexpected outages, with more than 1,100 flights canceled and more than 1,700 flights operating delayed on Friday morning (local time) following the outage of some Microsoft cloud services.

These disruptions have made it difficult for people flying to and from different airports in the US, with many of them expressing their frustration over unexpected flight delays and cancellations.

“Nobody here knows anything, the gate agents said we all know as much as they do,” a United Airlines passenger told ANI, saying his flight from Milwaukee to Washington was delayed for hours, first at the gates and then hours on the tarmac.

Another passenger, Mack, said: “I’m heading home… I didn’t know the internet was down. It’s a global outage.”

A passenger named Giane said: “I haven’t heard from the airline I’m traveling with. I just saw a news item appear on my phone… I’m tired, I want to get home.”

CrowdStrike – an American cybersecurity technology company that provides cloud workload protection, threat intelligence and cyber attack response services – said the outage, which caused chaos for many, was not a “cyber attack”. . Instead, there was a software issue and a fix was deployed.

Several U.S. airlines, including American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines, issued ground stops for all of their flights Friday morning due to communications problems, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The FAA told air traffic controllers to inform airborne pilots that airlines are currently experiencing communications problems. There were more than 1,100 canceled flights and more than 1,700 delays as of 8:05 a.m. ET, according to flight tracking website FlightAware.

“A third-party software outage is impacting computer systems around the world, including at United,” United Airlines said in a statement Friday morning. “While we work to restore these systems, we are maintaining all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights already flown continue to their destinations.”

“We are aware of a technical issue with CrowdStrike that is affecting several airlines. American is working with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and we apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines said in a statement.

The outage also affected industries ranging from banks to media companies.

“We are investigating an issue impacting users’ ability to access many Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft said in a statement posted on social media Friday morning.

After several companies around the world reported IT outages on Friday that included the display of the ‘Windows blue screen of death’, CrowdStrike, the security company linked to a software update that caused the outage, said in the Earlier in the day the issue was isolated and a fix deployed.

George Kurtz, president and CEO of CrowdStrike, said the cybersecurity company was working with customers on the issues they were facing while ensuring the issue was “not a security incident or cyberattack.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also reacted to the outage and said that Microsoft is working closely with CrowdStrike to provide technical guidance and support to customers.

“Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that has begun to impact IT systems around the world. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers with technical guidance and support to get their systems online safely,” Nadella posted on X.

On Friday, the outage affected companies across a range of sectors, from airlines, banks, food chains and brokers, to news organizations and railway networks. The travel industry has been hit hard, causing significant flight delays across the world.

(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)