Major IT Outage Grounds Thousands of U.S. Flights

Major U.S. carriers such as Delta and United Airlines faced significant flight cancellations and delays due to an IT vendor-related technical outage. While some operations resumed, recovery from the disruption continues. The issue, affecting critical systems, also impacted global sectors like banking and healthcare.

Major U.S. carriers, including Delta Air and United Airlines, began restoring some operations on Friday after being grounded due to a technical issue with an IT vendor. Despite this, delays and cancellations are expected to linger throughout the day as airlines strive to recover fully from the outage that disrupted flying schedules and inconvenienced thousands of passengers.

As of 1:23 pm ET on Friday, data from FlightAware revealed that more than 2,200 flights had been canceled and nearly 7,000 delayed across the U.S. Delta and United announced the resumption of some flights but warned of further delays and cancellations. To accommodate affected passengers, the airlines issued travel waivers.

According to a statement from United, the issue impacted various systems, including those used for calculating aircraft weight, customer check-ins, and phone systems in call centers. American Airlines confirmed it had safely resumed operations after initially issuing a ground stop notice. Southwest Airlines reported that it was not affected by the outage.

The technical problem extended beyond aviation, with outages at Microsoft and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike disrupting sectors like banking and healthcare worldwide. While the major airlines did not name the vendor, Frontier Airlines identified a 'major Microsoft technical outage' as the cause of its temporary operational halt.

CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz stated the issue stemmed from a defect in a content update for Microsoft Windows hosts. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged it was closely monitoring the situation and offering assistance where needed.

Parcel delivery firms FedEx and United Parcel Service also reported substantial disruptions. Microsoft pinpointed the outage's start around 6 pm ET on Thursday, affecting multiple Azure services in the Central U.S. region, impacting a subset of its customers.

(With inputs from agencies.)