Microsoft cloud outage grounds flights globally, causes widespread disruptions

A global Microsoft Cloud outage has resulted in aircraft cancellations, as airlines ground planes to avoid a communication crisis that might lead to crashes.

Some of the affected airlines include American Airlines AAL, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and KLM flights a report by Reuters shows.

Also affected were low-cost frontier airlines that confirmed having their operations affected by the outage.

"Frontier cancelled 147 flights on Thursday and delayed 212 others, according to data tracker FlightAware. 45% of Allegiant aircraft were delayed, while Sun Country delayed 23% of flights, the data showed. The companies did not give details on the number of flights impacted," Reuters noted in its report.

According to CNN, the Federal Aviation Administration said Frontier asked it to pause the airline's departures across the United States. A little after 10 pm ET, the FAA lifted the ground stop on Frontier.

"Microsoft on its Azure cloud software status report site said that around 6 pm ET, the service went down for some customers in the Central US region – "including failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services." The company said it determined the cause and is working to fix it. A company spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment," CNN added.

Microsoft said its outage started at about 4 am East African Time, 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.

In India, passengers display handwritten boarding passes as a result of the outage as the major airport in Singapore resulted in manual check-ins.

Also affected were media agencies, businesses, banks including South Africa's Capitec, the London Stock Exchange, and payment systems across various parts of the world including Australia and the United Kingdom, and hospital systems in the US as they could not access their computing systems.

Kenya's Fly Jambo Jet stated in a statement Friday morning, that it is facing a massive system outage across all of its stations and website owing to "a global system downtime."

"Please bear with us as we serve you through manual processes which may delay our services. Our teams are working to rectify the issue and we will share an update once this is resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience," the airline said on Friday morning.

Kenya Airways has also issued an alert of a system outage that is currently affecting the booking system.

Some business services such as South Africa's Capitec Bank's CPIJ.J card payment, ATM and app services have been fully restored after experiencing significant disruptions across all its banking channels.