Global System Outages Disrupt Flights, Banking, and Telecom Services Amid Technical Failures

On Friday, a series of significant system outages caused widespread disruptions across multiple sectors, affecting major U.S. airlines, financial institutions, and telecommunications companies globally.

American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Allegiant Air were among the carriers that grounded flights following reports of communication issues. This occurred shortly after Microsoft announced it had resolved a cloud services outage impacting various low-cost carriers. The connection between the flight groundings and the earlier Microsoft outage remains unclear.

In Australia, the impact of these disruptions was felt across media, banking, and telecom industries. The Australian government suggested that the outages might be related to an issue at Crowdstrike, a global cybersecurity firm. Crowdstrike’s customer service confirmed awareness of problems with Microsoft’s Windows operating system but did not confirm any link to the Australian disruptions.

The ripple effects of these outages extended to Spain, where a “computer incident” at all airports was reported. Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, issued a warning of potential disruptions affecting all airlines operating across the network, although specifics of the disruptions were not detailed.

AWS, a leading cloud service provider, announced that it was investigating reports of connectivity issues affecting Windows EC2 instances and Workspaces within its infrastructure. There was no immediate indication of whether these issues were connected to the broader disruptions or if other factors were at play.