A series of technical glitches disrupted services at airlines, banks and the London Stock Exchange on Friday, an unusual cascade of failures that erupted from the US to Asia after Microsoft Corp. reported an outage across its online services.
The first glitches emerged in the US late on Thursday, blamed on a failure of Microsoft services including Azure and 365. Denver-based Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings Inc., grounded flights for over two hours and blamed issues with Microsoft’s online services. The airline lifted a nationwide pause on departures and started the process of resuming flights from 11 p.m. New York time.
Major UK airlines also reported travel disruption on Friday morning.
The LSE Group, which operates the London stock exchange, said it’s experiencing a global technical issue preventing news from being published. In Asia, Japanese users began reporting glitches with services including Microsoft 365 — the company’s internet-based office software suite — in the afternoon.
Airlines at Mumbai and Hong Kong airports reverted to manually checking in passengers.
The latest failures came right after Microsoft said it had resolved an Azure cloud services outage. The company’s status pages had earlier showed Azure and Microsoft 365 experienced problems for several hours.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company is looking into the reported outages and issues.
