NAIROBI, Kenya- In a dramatic turn of events, a Microsoft cloud services outage in the Central U.S. region caused significant disruptions to several airlines, leading to flight cancellations and delays.
By early Friday, the tech giant announced the issue had been resolved, allowing normal operations to resume.
The outage, which began on Thursday, had a ripple effect across the aviation industry. Low-cost carriers such as Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and SunCountry were particularly hard hit.
Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, reported that the ground stop had been lifted and operations were in the process of returning to normal by late Thursday .
The U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, kept a close eye on the situation, emphasizing the department’s commitment to holding airlines accountable for passenger needs.
“We will hold the company and all other airlines to their responsibilities to meet the needs of passengers,” Buttigieg stated.
The outage stemmed from issues with Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform crucial for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.
Frontier cited a “major Microsoft technical outage” as the cause of their operational hiccups. Meanwhile, SunCountry blamed a third-party vendor without naming Microsoft directly. Allegiant’s website was also rendered unavailable due to the Azure issue .
FlightAware data revealed the extent of the disruption: Frontier cancelled 147 flights and delayed 212 others on Thursday.
Microsoft confirmed that the outage had been resolved by early Friday, restoring functionality to the affected Azure services.
However, the tech giant was still investigating another issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services, suggesting that some residual effects might linger for their enterprise customers .
As Microsoft works to fortify its systems against future disruptions, airlines and other dependent businesses must evaluate their contingency plans to ensure they can weather such technical storms with minimal impact.
