Major US airlines halt flights due to widespread system outages

(Reuters) – Major U.S. airlines halted flights on Friday due to communications problems, while other airlines, media companies, banks and telecoms firms around the world also reported system outages disrupting their operations.

American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air grounded their flights less than an hour after Microsoft announced that a cloud outage affecting several low-cost carriers had been resolved.

It was not immediately clear whether the call to halt flights was related to an earlier outage in the Microsoft cloud.

In Australia, media companies, banks and telecoms companies have been hit by outages, which the government blames on a problem with global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

The crowdsourced website Downdetector showed outages at several banks and telecom companies.

Crowdstrike sent out a recorded phone message on Friday when Reuters contacted tech support. The message was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system related to the Falcon sensor. Australia was not mentioned.

There was no information to indicate the outage was a cybersecurity incident, the office of Michelle McGuinness, Australia’s national cybersecurity coordinator, said in a post on X.

The disruptions were widespread. Spain reported a “computer incident” at all its airports, while Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned passengers of potential disruptions that it said would affect “all airlines operating in its network.” The nature of the disruptions was not specified.

The AWS cloud service provider said in a statement that it is “investigating reports of connectivity issues with Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within AWS.”

It was not immediately clear whether all reported outages were related to problems at Crowdstrike or whether there were other issues.

(Reporting by Reuters agencies; Writing by Tomasz Janowski; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)