Major US carriers ground flights amid global cyber outage (updated)

Sun Country Airlines Holdings

19/07/2024 11:50

(Changes media packaging code to CYBER-OUTAGES/US AIRLINES from
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       July 19 (Reuters) - Top U.S. airlines including Delta
 DAL.N , United  UAL.O  and American  AAL.O  issued ground stops
on Friday citing communication issues, as a global outage roiled
operations across a wide swathe of industries around the world.
    American Airlines, however, later said in a statement it had
re-established operations. Frontier and Spirit too cancelled
directives to ground planes.
    It was not clear if the groundings reported by the major
U.S. airlines were related to outages at Microsoft  MSFT.O  and
cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike that affected banking, healthcare
and a number of other sectors.
    Smaller players Frontier Airlines, Allegiant and SunCountry
 SNCY.O  had earlier reported outages.
    While American, Delta and United, the top three U.S.
airlines, had earlier said a technology issue with a third-party
vendor impacted them without naming the vendor, Frontier said
that a "major Microsoft technical outage" hit its operations
temporarily.
    "The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the
Microsoft Azure issue," Allegiant said in a statement to CNN. It
did not respond to Reuters' request for a comment.
    The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said in an emailed
statement it was closely monitoring the technical issue
impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines and that several airlines
had requested its assistance with ground stops.
    U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said the
department was monitoring flight cancellation and delay issues
at Frontier, adding that it will hold the company and all other
airlines "to their responsibilities to meet the needs of
passengers".
    A total of 518 flights were cancelled, with over 720
delayed, as of 5:58 am ET on Friday, according to data tracker
FlightAware.
    Microsoft said its outage started at about 6 pm ET on
Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues
with multiple Azure services in the Central U.S. region.
    Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services
for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.
    Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue
impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

 (Reporting by Maria Ponnezhath and Shivani Tanna; Additional
reporting by Chandni Shah, Nathan Gomes, Surbhi Mishra, Angela
Christy and David Shepardson; writing by Abinaya Vijayaraghavan
and Shubham Kalia; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala, Varun H K and
Nivedita Bhattacharjee)
 ((Maria.Ponnezhath@thomsonreuters.com; +91 8061822749;))