Massive tech outage affects air traffic, communications worldwide

Companies worldwide experienced interruptions amidst an outage of Microsoft’s cloud computing suites on Friday, with flights being grounded, news outlets unable to broadcast information, and operations in brokerage houses being hindered.

Outages have been reported mainly in Australia, the US, the UK, and India, among other countries, affecting institutions ranging from banks, media houses, and stock markets to government branches and airports.

According to Downdetector, a real-time internet outage monitoring website, breakdowns for Microsoft services, including the cloud computing program Azure and office software Microsoft 365, were reported globally within the last 24 hours. In the US, 1,751 outages were reported.

Microsoft said that its outage started at about 6pm Eastern Time (3am Pakistan Standard Time) on Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.

Separately, Microsoft announced it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

“We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft said on its website. “We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact.”

IT security firm Crowdstrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor.

“Thanks for contacting Crowdstrike support. Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows […] related to the Falcon sensor,” a prerecorded message played when a Reuters reporter called the company’s technical support.

According to the company, the Falcon Sensor software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the Blue Screen of Death.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologised for a global tech failure, vowing to work with all of its customers as they work to get their operations back online.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” he told NBC News’ ‘Today’ programme.

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and it’ll be operational,” Kurtz said. “It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover,” he added, but the company “would make sure every customer is fully recovered”.

Minimal outages reported in Pakistan

According to Downdetector, in Pakistan, a maximum of 25 outages of Microsoft Azure were reported, with only 13 outages of Microsoft 365.

Haroon Baloch, program manager at digital rights organisation Bytes for All told Dawn.com, “I’ve not heard as of now if any Pakistani organization or airline’s operations are disturbed due to Azure outage.”

Regarding air traffic operations in the country, a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) spokesperson said in a statement that the national carrier’s flight operations have been “fully restored and are operational.”

“As soon as the [glitch] was reported, the PIA switched to an alternative system of air operations,” the spokesperson said.

He added that one PIA flight at the Lahore airport was slightly delayed, but all other operations are fully normal.

US carriers ground flights citing communication issue

Major US carriers including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines issued ground stops on Friday morning citing communication issues, less than an hour after Microsoft resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.

It was not immediately clear whether the call to keep flights from taking off was related to the earlier Microsoft cloud outage. Apart from American and Delta, UAL and Allegiant Air too grounded flights.

The FAA did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and SunCountry had earlier reported outages that affected operations.

Frontier said late on Thursday that it was in the process of resuming normal operations, and that the ground stop had been lifted.

Frontier said earlier that a “major Microsoft technical outage” hit its operations temporarily, while SunCountry said a third-party vendor affected its booking and check-in facilities, without naming the company.

US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said the department was monitoring the flight cancellation and delay issues at Frontier, adding that the agency will hold the company and all other airlines “to their responsibilities to meet the needs of passengers”.

“The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue,” Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN. Allegiant did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Frontier cancelled 147 flights on Thursday and delayed 212 others, according to data tracker FlightAware. Forty-five per cent of Allegiant aircraft were delayed, while Sun Country delayed 23pc of flights, the data showed. The companies did not give details on the number of flights impacted.

Cyber outage hits Australia, New Zealand

A cyber outage related to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and Microsoft hit media, retailers, banks, airlines, and telecom companies across Australia and New Zealand on Friday.

Australia’s largest bank, Commonwealth Bank, said some customers had been unable to transfer money due to the service outage. National airline Qantas and Sydney Airport said planes were delayed but still flying.

Victorian state police said some internal systems had been hit by the outage but emergency services were operating normally. The output of many media companies was also disrupted.

“Like a number of other organisations, global issues affecting Crowdstrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems,” a spokesperson for telecoms firm Telstra said on Friday. “The issue is causing some holdups for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience.”

There was no information to suggest the outage was a cybersecurity incident, the office of Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X.

“I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” it said in the statement which did not mention Crowdstrike.

“Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies.”

A spokesperson for New Zealand’s parliament said its computer systems had also been affected.

State broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a “major network outage”, without giving a reason.

In a pre-recorded message played on Sky News Australia as regular programming was disrupted, correspondent Tom Connell said the outage was not believed to be the result of a hack.

“Our computers, our systems are down all the things that make Sky News run down and indeed for many other major companies around the country,” he said.

A Reuters reporter saw error messages on payment systems at grocery chain Harris Farm in Sydney on Friday.

Five Indian airlines report extensive IT disruptions

Three Indian airlines announced disruptions to their booking systems on Friday, matching widespread technical problems reported by flight operators around the world.

“Our systems are currently impacted by a Microsoft outage,” IndiGo, the country’s largest airline by market share, said in a post on social media platform X. “During this time booking, check-in, access to your boarding pass, and some flights may be impacted.”

National carrier Air India said its systems had been “impacted temporarily due to the current Microsoft outage”, causing travel delays.

Fellow budget carrier SpiceJet said it had reverted to manual check-ins and boarding after “technical challenges”. “Our teams are diligently working with our service provider to resolve these issues promptly,” the airline said.

Akasa Air said “infrastructure issues” had taken its booking and check-in services offline.

Delhi Airport in India’s capital said it was “working with all our stakeholders to minimise the inconvenience” to passengers.

Meanwhile, The Press Trust of India news agency reported that passengers were “stranded” in the coastal holiday hotspot Goa as a result of a technical glitch with the airport’s check-in system.

‘Server offline message’

In Edinburgh, a Reuters witness said boarding pass scanners carried a “server offline message”, with the airport saying passengers shouldn’t travel to the airport without checking their flight status online first.

Elsewhere, airports and airlines advised customers to arrive earlier than normal for flights. Analysts said the outage was likely tied to a glitch in Microsoft software used globally.

Microsoft MSFT.O said users might be unable to access various Office 365 apps and services due to a “configuration change in a portion of our Azure-backed workloads”.

Hong Kong International Airport said a Microsoft outage was affecting several airlines and it had switched to manual check-in, but flight operations had not been affected. Singapore’s Changi airport also said check-ins were being handled manually.

According to an alert sent by Crowdstrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company’s “Falcon Sensor” software was causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the “Blue Screen of Death”.

The alert, sent at 0530 GMT on Friday, also shared a manual workaround to rectify the issue. A Crowdstrike spokesperson did not respond to emails or calls requesting comment.

Chaos

The alert sparked chaos for passengers from Madrid to New Delhi, with European air traffic control body Eurocontrol saying it was unclear how many flights had been impacted.

At Madrid-Barajas Airport, passengers complained of queues and a lack of information.

“Nobody was around to tell us where we could check in when we arrived … so different groups queued in different places and then in the end someone, after a bottleneck of people was formed, told us to come here,” Ana Rodriguez, a tourist from Mexico, said.

The aviation sector is hit particularly hard due to its sensitivity to timings. Airlines rely on a closely coordinated schedule often run by air traffic control. Just one delay of a few minutes can throw off a flight schedule for take-offs and landings for an airport and airline for the rest of the day.

In Europe, Schiphol airport, Berlin airport, London Gatwick, Edinburgh airport and others said they were impacted by the outage.

“We expect longer waiting times and some flight cancellations. Not all airports in Europe were impacted as the issue is linked with a specific OS, Microsoft Azure,” said Agata Lyznik, a spokesperson for airports group ACI Europe.

In Europe, airlines are required to compensate passengers for delays of more than three hours but it was unclear to what extent they would be held legally responsible for the outage.

Slow Resolution

Some airlines and airports said they were already back online, with Spanish carrier Iberia saying it had managed to avoid flight cancellations.

“From 9:25am onwards the electronic check-in counters and online check-ins were reactivated. There have been some delays,” a spokesperson said.

Others came up with temporary workarounds.

In India, airlines at New Delhi airport’s Terminal 3 were giving handwritten boarding passes to flyers, while airport staff were using white-boards to display gate information for flights, according to an official for the airport.

At Dubai International (DXB), the world’s busiest international airport, check-ins for some flights at Terminals 1 and 2 were affected, but the airlines switched to an alternative system, Dubai Airports said.