Microsoft outage paralyzes airlines and banks around the world
A wave of technical failures swept from the United States to Asia today, July 19, after Microsoft reported a failure in its online services. This disrupted the work of airlines, banks, the London Stock Exchange, etc.
McDonald’s Corp., United Airlines Holdings Inc. and LSE Group were among the largest companies that disclosed various problems with customer communication. They were the most prominent of the many corporations from Japan to India to the United States that reported disruptions in their operations. It was unclear what caused the problems, which coincided with Microsoft’s outage, Bloomberg reports.
Some media outlets have reported problems with the cybersecurity software CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. The Australian company AGL Energy Ltd. reported in a post on X that it is currently experiencing system problems due to a CrowdStrike failure.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was looking into the situation, while Crowdstrike representatives were not available for comment after hours and calls to their main number in Japan went unanswered.
The first outages appeared in the United States late Thursday night, due to disruptions in Microsoft services, including Azure and 365. Denver-based Frontier Airlines, part of Frontier Group Holdings Inc. has suspended flights for more than two hours. The airline canceled a nationwide pause in flights and began the process of resuming flights at 23:00 New York time.
The LSE Group, which operates the London Stock Exchange, said it has experienced a global technical problem that has prevented it from publishing news. In Asia, Japanese users began reporting outages in services including Microsoft 365, the company’s online office software suite, in the afternoon. Airlines at Mumbai and Hong Kong airports have returned to manual check-in.
The latest outage comes just after Microsoft said it had fixed the Azure cloud services outage. The company’s status pages had previously shown that Azure and Microsoft 365 had been experiencing problems for several hours.
