Friday, July 19, 2024 American Airlines, based in Fort Worth, Texas, is a prominent U.S. airline located within the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area.
It holds the title of the world’s largest airline in terms of scheduled passengers and revenue passenger miles. Alongside its regional partners and affiliates, American Airlines operates a vast network of both international and domestic flights, offering nearly 6,800 flights daily to close to 350 destinations across 48 countries. Additionally, American Airlines is a founding member of the Oneworld alliance.
In recent news, American Airlines, a leading airline in the United States, suspended all flights early Friday morning due to a communication issue, as reported by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This incident follows a significant outage of Microsoft’s cloud services that disrupted operations for several low-cost airlines just hours earlier. The FAA confirmed the ground stop, which is an unusual and serious occurrence that affects air travel nationwide.
However, specific details regarding the communication issue impacting American Airlines have not been disclosed. As of now, American Airlines has not released an official statement regarding the reason for the ground stop or how long it is expected to last. This event comes on the heels of a separate disruption on Thursday night, which affected low-cost carriers such as Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and Sun Country.
The Microsoft cloud outage was identified as the source of these problems. Microsoft indicated that the outage began around 6 PM ET on Thursday, causing various Azure services in the Central U.S.
region to malfunction for some customers. Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, is essential for many airlines, providing services necessary for booking, check-in, and operational management. The failure of these services resulted in significant operational issues for affected airlines.
Frontier Airlines noted that a “major Microsoft technical outage” temporarily disrupted its operations, while Sun Country mentioned that a third-party vendor was responsible for issues with its booking and check-in systems, without naming Microsoft. The impact of the Microsoft outage led to numerous flight cancellations and delays. Frontier Airlines alone canceled 147 flights and delayed 212 others, according to FlightAware.
Allegiant reported that 45% of its flights were delayed, and Sun Country experienced delays on 23% of its flights. Microsoft confirmed early Friday that the Azure outage affecting the Central U.S.
region has been resolved, but the company is now looking into a different issue impacting various Microsoft 365 applications and services. These consecutive technology failures highlight the critical dependence of airlines on cloud services and the potential for widespread disruptions when such systems fail..
