Microsoft outage causes Utahns to experience airline traffic
Jul 19, 2024, 11:58 AM | Updated: 1:53 pm
Utahns may have experienced problems with their flights on Friday due to a Microsoft outage (Jeffrey D. Allred/Deseret News)
(Jeffrey D. Allred/Deseret News)
SALT LAKE CITY — Cities all around the world are experiencing technical difficulties due to a Microsoft malfunction that occurred early Friday morning.
Microsoft said its customers may have experienced problems with Azure services, including failures with service management operations and connection problems.
According to Microsoft, the issues started between 21:56 UTC on Thursday and 12:15 UTC on Friday. Those problems were reported in the Central U.S. region.
“A storage incident impacted the availability of Virtual Machines which may have also restarted unexpectedly,” Microsoft said. “Services with dependencies on the impacted virtual machines and storage resources would have experienced impact.”
The main problem is reported to be with a cybersecurity firm known as CrowdStrike, according to the Associated Press. The cybersecurity firm was running a faulty update when outages began.
Outages affected airlines around the world by grounding airlines and delaying flights.
According to Flight Aware, as of 11:30 a.m., there were up to 6,632 flight delays within, into, or out of the United States of America. At the same time, there were 2,282 canceled flights within, into, or out of the U.S.
As of 7 a.m., the Salt Lake International Airport said to expect up to a 57-minute delay for arriving flights.
Responses to the Microsoft outage
Delta said in an X post that it had resumed some of its flights by 6:38 a.m.
Delta has resumed some flights after a vendor technology issue impacting airlines and businesses globally. We’ve issued a travel waiver and customers can monitor and manage their itineraries on https://t.co/oAYy2BBlGo or the Fly Delta app. For more info: https://t.co/GSbpUNpU9d
— Delta (@Delta) July 19, 2024
United Airlines experienced similar problems on Friday morning. The airline said in an X post that “many customers traveling today may experience delays.”
A third-party outage is impacting computer systems, including at United and many other organizations worldwide.
As we work to fully restore these systems, some flights are resuming. Many customers traveling today may experience delays.
We have issued a waiver to make it easier…
— United Airlines (@united) July 19, 2024
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox stated on his X account that the outage had not impacted state IT platforms.
No state IT platforms have been impacted by the CrowdStrike outage this morning. We will continue to monitor the situation.
— Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox (@GovCox) July 19, 2024
The Federal Aviation Administration said in an X post that as of 8:53 a.m., the outage was not impacting FAA operations.
Currently FAA operations are not impacted by the global IT issue. We continue to monitor the situation closely.
— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) July 19, 2024
Microsoft said the company will be looking into what happened in more detail.
“We will publish a Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR) within approximately 72 hours, to share more details on what happened and how we responded,” Microsoft said. “After our internal retrospective is completed, generally within 14 days, we will publish a Final Post Incident Review with any additional details and learnings.”
The company said people can keep updated on its future response to the outage and Azure issues on its website.
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