A major technical outage at Microsoft Thursday caused massive disruptions to at least four airlines, delaying flights, canceling them, and causing their booking systems to go haywire. It was just the latest incident to underline how significant a role cloud computing services now play in the airline industry and just how far-reaching a disruption can be when they go wrong.
It hit Frontier Airlines the hardest, briefly grounding all of their flights. The company said that its operations had been briefly hampered by the Microsoft issue. According to FlightAware, a flight tracking service, Frontier scrubbed 147 flights and delayed 212 others on Thursday.
Other carriers had big problems, too. Allegiant Air’s website went down, the Nevada-based carrier said in a statement to CNN, “due to a known Microsoft Azure issue.” Allegiant had systemwide delays, according to FlightAware data, with 45% of its fleet grounded.
Sun Country airlines said that there was a delay in check-in and booking caused by a third party vendor which resulted in 23% flight delay. They did not directly name Microsoft though.
Microsoft mentioned that the outage started at 6 PM ET on Thursday, which affected many customers while using multiple Azure services in the Central US region. Core to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform provides key services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services used by many businesses, including airlines.
The technology giant also said it was working on other issues affecting several Microsoft 365 apps and services, which infuriated the affected businesses further.
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The airlines did not provide specific details on the total flights impacted, but data from FlightAware shows how badly this disruption hit several carriers.
This incident underlines the growing reliance of the aviation industry on cloud-based services and the possibility of far-flung disruptions when key systems go down. The more technology-reliant airlines are in their operations, the more essential the resilience and reliability of these systems become in ensuring the smoothness of passenger air travel experiences as much as possible.