Major U.S. Airlines Ground Flights Due to Communication Issues

On Friday morning, major U.S. Airlines, including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines, issued ground stops, citing communication issues. This came less than an hour after Microsoft resolved a cloud services outage that had impacted several low-cost carriers.

Potential Connection to Microsoft Outage:

It remains unclear if the ground stops issued by American, Delta, UAL, and Allegiant Air are related to the earlier Microsoft cloud outage. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not directly respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Impact on Low-Cost Carriers:

Low-cost carriers such as Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and SunCountry reported outages that affected their operations. Frontier, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, stated that it was resuming normal operations and that its ground stop had been lifted late Thursday. The airline attributed the disruption to a “major Microsoft technical outage.”

SunCountry mentioned that a third-party vendor affected its booking and check-in facilities without naming the company involved. According to CNN, Allegiant’s website was reportedly unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue. Allegiant did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.

Flight Disruptions:

Data tracker FlightAware reported that Frontier canceled 147 flights and delayed 212 others on Thursday. Allegiant experienced delays on 45% of its flights, while Sun Country had 23% of its flights delayed. The airlines did not provide detailed figures on the total number of flights affected.

Microsoft’s Outage Details:

Microsoft’s outage began around 6 pm ET on Thursday, impacting a subset of its customers who experienced issues with multiple Azure services in the Central U.S. region. Azure is a cloud computing forum that provides services for building, deploying, and operating applications and services.

Response from the U.S. Department of Transportation:

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg stated that the department was monitoring Frontier’s flight cancellation and delay issues and emphasized that the agency would hold the company and all other airlines accountable for meeting passengers’ needs.

Investigation into Microsoft 365 Apps and Services:

In addition to the Azure issues, Microsoft announced that it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services, further complicating the situation for affected carriers and passengers.