The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued network-wide ground stops for Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, along with American Airlines regional subsidiary PSA, following a global IT outage affecting Microsoft’s Azure platform.
The outage, which seems to be connected to the CrowdStrike security platform, has affected airlines and airports worldwide, as well as banks, supermarkets and the London Stock Exchange.
Issues seem to have first emerged in Australia before cascading globally, with many airlines reverting to manual check-in processes to get flight airborne. The likes of Turkish Airlines, British Airways and Ryanair have all be affected but are trying to maintain their operations.
American Airlines had also grounded all of its mainline fleet, citing what it called a ‘communication issue’ although the carrier later said that it had been able to safely restart operations.
United Airlines also said that it was resuming some flights but that passengers should expect disruption throughout Friday.
Friday’s outage came just hours after low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines reported its own Microsoft-related IT outage which had also resulted in a temporary ground stop. Frontier said it had resolved the outage, and the ground stop was lifted.
It is not known whether the issue that impacted Frontier is related to the wider Microsoft IT outage.
Despite the ground stops in the United States, many other airlines are attempting to fly their schedules, but there are issues booking and changing flights and contacting customer service lines.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, however, said it had been forced to “largely suspend” its operations until it could get its computer systems working normally again.
In a statement, the Spanish airport operator Aena said that it had reverted to manual processes to get passengers on their way, although later said that it was already “recovering some of its systems”.
“All airports are operational, but some processes operate more slowly,” the airport operator said in a statement posted to its official X account.
Disruption is expected throughout the day with a Turkish Airlines spokesperson noting that its operations were already returning to normal.
Europe’s air traffic control regulator, EUROCONTROL, said all arrivals into Amsterdam and Zurich airports had been suspended due to the IT outage. Zurich is not expected to reopen until 6 pm on Friday, while Amsterdam is hoping to start accepting flights from midday.
Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport did suspend operations for a short while but has since reopened to both departing and arriving flights.
Meanwhile, EUROCONTROL said the following airports were also experiencing delays as a result of the Microsoft issues: Barcelona, Alicante, Ibiza, Menorca, and Palma de Mallorca, all in Spain.
In a statement, a spokesperson for United Airlines told us: “A third party software outage is impacting computer systems worldwide, including at United. While we work to restore those systems, we are holding all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights already airborne are continuing to their destinations.”
