Microsoft announced early Friday that it resolved a cloud services outage in the Central U.S. region which had led to the grounding and cancellation of several flights.
Low-cost carriers including Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and Sun Country experienced operational disruptions due to the outage. Frontier reported late Thursday that it was resuming normal operations and the ground stop had been lifted.
Frontier Airlines had described the incident as a “major Microsoft technical outage” that temporarily halted its operations. Sun Country mentioned a third-party vendor affected its booking and check-in facilities without specifying Microsoft. Allegiant informed CNN that its website was down due to the Microsoft Azure issue but did not respond to Reuters for comments.
The outage, which began around 6 pm ET on Thursday, affected multiple Azure services in the Central U.S. region. Azure is a cloud computing platform that offers various services for building, deploying, and managing applications.
According to data tracker FlightAware, Frontier cancelled 147 flights and delayed 212 others on Thursday. Allegiant had 45% of its flights delayed, while Sun Country delayed 23% of its flights. The airlines did not provide exact numbers of the flights affected.
Microsoft also mentioned investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services during the outage.
