By On Friday, a widespread outage of Microsoft’s cloud computing services caused significant interruptions for companies worldwide. The outage led to grounded flights, disrupted news broadcasts, and hindered operations in brokerage houses.
Reports of outages spanned across Australia, the US, the UK, and India, affecting a range of institutions including banks, media outlets, stock markets, government branches, and airports.
DownDetector, a real-time internet outage monitoring site, reported global breakdowns for Microsoft services such as Azure and Microsoft 365 over the last 24 hours. The US saw 1,751 outages, while Pakistan reported a maximum of 25 Azure outages and 13 Microsoft 365 outages.
Microsoft indicated that the outage began around 6pm Eastern Time (3am Pakistan Standard Time) on Thursday, affecting multiple Azure services in the Central US region. The company is also investigating issues 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 stated on its website. “We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact.”
IT security firm Crowdstrike acknowledged reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system linked to its Falcon sensor. A prerecorded message from Crowdstrike support confirmed awareness of the issue.
Major US airlines, including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines, issued ground stops on Friday morning citing communication problems, shortly after Microsoft resolved its cloud services outage that had impacted several low-cost carriers. It remains unclear if the ground stops were directly related to the Microsoft outage.
The FAA did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and SunCountry experienced operational disruptions, with Frontier resuming normal operations late Thursday and lifting its ground stop.
US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg stated that the department is monitoring the situation and will hold airlines accountable for meeting passenger needs. Allegiant’s website was affected by the Microsoft Azure issue, delaying 45% of its flights, while Sun Country delayed 23%.
A cyber outage linked to Crowdstrike and Microsoft impacted media, retailers, banks, airlines, and telecom companies across Australia and New Zealand on Friday. Commonwealth Bank reported issues with money transfers, while Qantas and Sydney Airport experienced flight delays.
Victoria state police reported some internal systems were hit but emergency services remained operational. Several media companies also faced disruptions.
Telstra, a major telecoms firm, noted the global issue affecting Crowdstrike and Microsoft was causing delays for some customers. Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness stated there was no evidence to suggest the outage was a cybersecurity incident.
“I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” the office posted on X, without specifically mentioning Crowdstrike.
The outages highlight the extensive reliance on cloud computing services and the widespread impact when such critical infrastructure experiences technical difficulties.
