1,100 Flights Cancelled In US As Microsoft Outage Disrupts Operations

Air passengers around the United States faced delays, while some airlines halted flight operations as Microsoft-based computers ceased to work after a global outage on Friday.

Many airports across the US experienced unexpected disruption with over 1,100 flights getting cancelled and over 1,700 flights operating behind schedule on Friday morning (local time) after certain cloud services of Microsoft were disrupted.

These disruptions gave a hard time to people flying to and from different airports across the US, with many of them expressing their frustration over the unexpected delays and cancellations of flights.

"No one here knows anything, the gate agents said we all know as much as they do," a United Airlines passenger told ANI, saying his flight from Milwaukee to Washington was delayed for hours first at the gates and then hours on the tarmac.

Another passenger, Mack, said, "I am on my way home...I did not know that the internet was out. It is a global outage."

A passenger named Giane said, "I did not hear anything from the airline that I am travelling from. I just saw a news pop up on my phone...I am tired, I want to get home."

CrowdStrike -- an American cybersecurity technology firm that provides cloud workload protection, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services - said the outage, which sparked chaos for many, was not a 'cyberattack'. Instead, there was an issue with software and a fix had been deployed.

Several US carriers, including American Airlines, United Airlines, and Delta Air Lines, issued ground stops for all their flights early on Friday due to communication problems, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The FAA told air traffic controllers to tell airborne pilots that airlines are currently experiencing communication issues. There were over 1,100 flights cancelled and more than 1,700 delays as of 8:05 am ET (Eastern Time), according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

"A third-party software outage is impacting computer systems worldwide, including at United," United Airlines said in a statement on Friday morning. "While we work to restore those systems, we are holding all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights already airborne are continuing to their destinations."

"We're aware of a technical issue with CrowdStrike that is impacting multiple carriers. American is working with CrowdStrike to resolve the issue as quickly as possible and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience," American Airlines said in a statement.

The outage also affected industries ranging from banks to media companies.

"We're investigating an issue impacting users' ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services," Microsoft said in a statement released on social media Friday morning.

After various businesses across the world reported IT outages on Friday, which included seeing the 'Windows blue screen of death', CrowdStrike, the security firm linked to a software update that caused the outage said earlier in the day, that the issue has been isolated and a fix deployed.

George Kurtz, President and CEO of CrowdStrike, said the cybersecurity company was working with customers on the issues they faced while giving reassurance that the issue was "not a security incident or cyberattack."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also reacted to the outage and said Microsoft is working closely with CrowdStrike to provide technical guidance and support to the customers.

"Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online," Nadella posted on X.

On Friday the outage affected companies across various sectors, from airlines, banks, food chains and brokerage houses, to news organisations and railway networks. The travel industry was greatly affected, causing significant delays in flights across the world.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)