A major Microsoft technical outage on Friday disrupted global flight services, including in India. The tech giant said its outage started at about 6 pm ET (IST 3:30 am) on Thursday with customers experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 apps and services.
This led to the cancellation of several flights in the Central U.S. region and banks. Though the cause, exact nature and scale of the outage was unclear.
In India, Akasa Air, IndiGo and SpiceJet reported issues with booking and check-in following which several airlines, grounding planes and disrupting flight operations at Delhi and Mumbai airports.
A statement by Akasa Airlines read: "Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable."
SpiceJet too took to X to announce "technical challenges with our service provider, affecting online services including booking, check-in, and manage booking functionalities. "As a result, we have activated manual check-in and boarding processes across airports. We kindly request passengers with upcoming travel plans to arrive at the airport earlier than usual to complete check-in at our counters," the statement read.
IndiGo's post read that its systems were currently impacted by a Microsoft outage. "during this time booking, check-in, access to your boarding pass, and some flights may be impacted," it added.
Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion and that they were observing a positive trend in service availability. The company did not respond to a request for comment. It did not explain the cause of the outage further.
