The airline industry is having a rough day so far, due to a major IT outage…
Airlines around the globe ground flights due to IT issues
Over the past several hours (early Friday morning US time), we’ve seen some major global IT outages. First we saw Microsoft have a major outage impacting Microsoft’s Azure services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps in some regions, and then we’ve seen a CrowdStrike software update that caused additional issues.
All parties insist this is not a security incident or cyberattack, and that they’ve identified and isolated the incident, and are deploying a fix.
While this has impacted all kinds of industries, the implications most relevant to OMAAT readers are that airlines around the globe have largely paused flight in recent hours.
For example, early Friday morning we’ve seen American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines, all suspend flights, as they work through this outage.
This issue has now persisted for hours, so we’ll see when the situation is resolved, and airlines can resume their flights.
This will have a huge domino effect for airlines
From the perspective of the US airline industry, at least this happened in the very early morning hours, when not many flights are departing. Obviously the impact of this would be much greater if this happened a bit later in the day, when a huge number of flights are departing.
Even though this happened at the best possible time (in some sense), I’d expect this to have some implications for airlines throughout the day. Airlines plan their schedules with not much of a buffer, so delays with one flight can lead to delays for the rest of the day. Here’s a look at current flight cancelations and delays globally.
For example, I’m seeing many flights from Europe to the United States on US airlines delayed today, and that could of course impact connections as well.
Bottom line
It’s not a great Friday for airlines so far, as an IT outage is causing many airlines to pause flights. Hopefully this is resolved soon. Even once resolved, though, make sure you’re patient if traveling today, as there could be some delays.
Were the flights of any OMAAT readers impacted by this Microsoft outage?
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