Early Friday morning, airlines such as American, Delta, and United were forced to ground flights globally due to a widespread tech outage affecting Microsoft’s cloud services, according to reports from the Associated Press and other news outlets in Australia and the UK.
The impact of this outage reached Houston around 5 a.m., where Bush airport announced via X (formerly Twitter) that the issue would affect “several airlines, resulting in delays and longer wait times this morning.” They advised travelers to “check directly with your airline” for the latest updates on flight statuses.
Airports worldwide, including those in Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Rome, Zurich, and Hong Kong, reported similar delays. The technical issues forced many passengers to check in manually, with one traveler in India even posting a photo of a “hand-written” boarding pass for his IndiGo flight.
Despite the significant disruptions, George Kurtz, CEO of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, clarified early Friday that the issues stemmed from an outage, not a security incident or cyberattack. According to Kurtz, the problems were caused by “a defect found in a single content update for Windows,” which has since been identified, isolated, and fixed.
Microsoft had announced on X Thursday evening that they were “investigating an issue impacting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.” The most recent update, posted just before 3 a.m., indicated that “multiple services are continuing to see improvements.”
