Airlines suspend flights over global IT outage

Delta Air Lines, one of the major airlines in the United States, says it has suspended all flights following a vendor technology issue experienced across all markets that occurred in the early hours of Friday, July 19, 2024.

This was contained in a statement by Delta’s Corporate Communications Department in Lagos State on Friday.

The airline noted that customers whose flights were impacted would be notified by Delta via the Fly Delta app and text messages.

It urged customers to use the Fly Delta app for updates, adding: “We apologise for the inconvenience, as our teams work through this issue.

“Reports indicated that other airlines may also be impacted.”

A technical issue with a vendor impacted many carriers in the United States, causing flight delays and a total pause in flight operations on Friday.

American Airlines, on its X (formerly Twitter) account, while apologising to its customers, assured that the issues had been resolved.

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United Airlines, on its X account, also said it would be issuing waivers to make it easier for passengers to change travel plans on its website.

The airline added that a third-party outage impacted computer systems and affected many organisations worldwide.

It stated: “As we work to fully restore these systems, some flights are resuming. Many customers travelling today may experience delays.

“We have issued a waiver to make it easier to change your travel plans at http://United.com or the United app.”

However, Qatar Airways disclosed that the technology glitch did not affect its international flight operations.

KLM Airlines also gave its customers a heads up as it stated that there might be flight delays and cancellations due to the glitch.

The disruption has been linked to a downtime experienced with Microsoft internet services and issues with Cloudstrike.

Microsoft had, in a statement, said a configuration change in a portion of “our Azure backend workloads” caused interruption between storage and compute resources and resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on the connections.

Microsoft noted that the issue may impact any user attempting to use various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

It added: “Services affected include – PowerBI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 admin centre, and Microsoft Purview.

“We will continue to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact.”

The Star