A widespread technical malfunction originating from Microsoft’s Azure backend disrupted operations across airlines, banks, and major corporations globally on Friday, impacting services from customer communications to financial transactions. Due to ”communication issues”, the largest airlines worldwide grounded all flights early Friday morning, leading to the cancellation of over 1,000 flights in the United States alone. American Airlines, United, and Delta experienced an unprecedented system failure, causing global travel disruptions.
On Friday, an X user shared a 12-hour time-lapse map using the flight tracking website Flightradar24.com, to show how US commercial flights were severely impacted by the outage. The footage shows a detailed depiction of the air traffic operations of American Airlines, Delta, and United flights across the mainland USA. As per the map, flights came to a halt overnight in the US, highlighting the complete collapse of air traffic systems.
Sharing the video, Colin McCarthy wrote, ”12-hour timelapse of American Airlines, Delta, and United plane traffic after what was likely the biggest IT outage in history forced a nationwide ground stop of the three airlines.”
Watch the video here:
12-hour timelapse of American Airlines, Delta, and United plane traffic after what was likely the biggest IT outage in history forced a nationwide ground stop of the three airlines. pic.twitter.com/wwcQeiEtVe
— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) July 19, 2024
In India too, almost all air carriers — Vistara, IndiGo, SpiceJet and Akasa Air — faced technical issues that affected booking, check-in and flight updates. As a result, many carriers in India were forced to check in passengers manually. Akshay Kothari, co-founder of US-based firm NotionHQ, shared on X a picture of his “first handwritten boarding pass” before travelling.
CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity firm, confirmed that the widespread outage was not caused by a malicious cyberattack, but rather was a result of a software update issue affecting Microsoft Windows systems.
