Airline IT Outages: Delta, United, American Airlines Flights Grounded Due to Communications Problem, FAA Says

CNN
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All flights from many major US airlines – including: Deltaunited and American Airlines – Thirty-eight Airbus A320-300 aircraft were grounded Friday morning due to a communication problem, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, although American Airlines later said it had resolved the issue affecting its operations.

“Earlier this morning, a technical issue with a vendor impacted several airlines, including American Airlines. As of 5 a.m. ET, we were able to safely restore operations. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience,” American Airlines said in a statement to CNN.

The FAA said the grounding affected all airline flights, regardless of their destination.

It is unclear how long the grounding period will last for other airlines.

Their grounding comes after a long time. Microsoft Service Outage Frontier Airlines and some rival airlines grounded flights for several hours on Thursday — though groundings for those carriers have since been lifted.

Earlier on Thursday, Frontier said its systems were affected by the outage, and offered refunds to affected passengers.

Other rivals, including Allegiant and SunCountry, said they also faced difficulties, including with online booking, check-in and flight management functions.

The Federal Aviation Administration also announced Friday morning that all Allegiant flights would be grounded.

On Azure Cloud Status Report SiteMicrosoft said the service was down for some customers in the central United States around 6 p.m. ET, “including disruptions to service management operations, connectivity, or service availability.”

The company said it has identified the cause and is working to fix it. A company spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A number of global airlines also reported technical disruptions on Friday, including Virgin Australia and Qantas, along with airports across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.