- Customers travelling with the airline said they had been stranded on planes.
Major US carrier American Airlines issued a grounding for all flights early Friday due to a communications issue, while hospitals and 911 services also reported system outages amid concerns about a widespread Microsoft server crash.
American Airlines did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment on the ground stopover.
But customers travelling with the airline said on social media that their pilots had told them all systems were down and all planes had to remain grounded until they were operational again.
Many complained of being stranded on planes waiting on the runway before takeoff or after landing at their destination.
Social media was also flooded with reports from medical staff across the country that electronic medical records (EMR) systems had failed, raising fears that Microsoft systems were experiencing outages around the world.
In Australia, computer security firm Crowdstrike released a recorded phone message today saying it was aware of reports of bugs in Microsoft’s Windows operating system as staff at Sydney and Melbourne airports reported a system failure.
And images shared on social media showed self-checkouts, ATMs and a host of other technology displaying error messages.
Microsoft said this morning that it was taking “mitigation actions” following the service issues, but did not offer further information.
American Airlines planes at a terminal at LaGuardia Airport
Cyber crisis hits Australians at Woolworths with ‘massive queues’ forming as Microsoft suffers massive international outage
This comes hours after the operations of several low-cost airlines, including Frontier, were affected on Wednesday and Thursday due to an outage in Microsoft’s cloud.
Microsoft said Thursday it was investigating issues with its cloud services in the central United States that had caused several flights to be grounded and cancelled.
Frontier, Allegiant and SunCountry airlines reported outages affecting their operations.
While Frontier said a “major Microsoft technical outage” had temporarily affected its operations, SunCountry said a third-party vendor affected its reservation and check-in facilities, without naming the company.
“The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the issue with Microsoft Azure,” Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN. Allegiant did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Frontier canceled 147 flights Thursday and delayed 212 others, according to data tracker FlightAware. Forty-five percent of Allegiant’s planes were delayed, while Sun Country delayed 23% of flights, the data showed.
The airlines did not give details on the number of flights affected.
Microsoft said its outage began at approximately 6 p.m. ET on Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the US Central 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 affecting several Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a Reuters request seeking further details about the outage.
Other affected carriers included Allegiant and SunCountry.
Microsoft said its Azure cloud software had suffered a temporary outage that caused an interruption in “service management operations and service connectivity or availability” in the central US region.
However, the disruption did not affect American Airlines, it said earlier in a statement to Reuters, suggesting the carrier had suffered a separate problem.