Major U.S. Airlines Ground Flights After Communication Issues

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Major U.S. airlines, including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines, issued ground stops, halting flights from taking off due to reported communication issues. This disruption occurred less than an hour after Microsoft resolved a cloud services outage that had earlier affected several low-cost carriers.

The precise connection, if any, between the current flight ground stops and the recent Microsoft cloud outage was not immediately clear. In addition to American, Delta, and United, Allegiant Air also grounded its flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had not provided an immediate response to inquiries from Reuters regarding the issue.

Earlier, low-cost carriers such as Frontier Airlines, a subsidiary of Frontier Group Holdings, Allegiant, and SunCountry Airlines, reported disruptions to their operations. Frontier announced late Thursday that it was in the process of resuming normal flight operations and had lifted the ground stop.

Frontier attributed its operational disruptions to a “major Microsoft technical outage” that temporarily impacted its services. SunCountry indicated that a third-party vendor was responsible for disruptions to its booking and check-in systems, though the vendor was not named.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg stated that the department was closely monitoring the situation involving Frontier Airlines. He emphasized that the agency would hold airlines accountable for addressing passenger needs amid the disruptions.

Allegiant, based in Nevada, reported to CNN that its website was unavailable due to issues with Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing platform. Allegiant had not responded to Reuters’ request for additional comments at the time of publication.

According to data from FlightAware, Frontier Airlines canceled 147 flights and delayed 212 others on Thursday. Allegiant experienced delays with 45% of its flights, while SunCountry saw delays affecting 23% of its flights. Details on the exact number of affected flights were not provided by the airlines.

Microsoft reported that its outage began around 6 p.m. ET on Thursday, with some customers experiencing issues with various Azure services in the Central U.S. region. Azure is a cloud computing platform used for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.

In addition to the Azure issues, Microsoft announced it was investigating separate problems impacting various Microsoft 365 applications and services.