Microsoft said on Thursday it was investigating issues with its cloud services in the central United States that caused several flights to be grounded or canceled.
Low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, Allegiant Air and Sun Country Airlines reported disruptions affecting operations.
Frontier Airlines said a “major Microsoft technical outage” temporarily affected its operations, while Sun Country Airlines, without naming the company, said a third-party vendor affected its reservations and check-in facilities.
“The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to an issue with Microsoft Azure,” Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN. Allegiant did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Frontier Airlines canceled 147 flights and delayed 212 on Thursday, according to data tracking company FlightAware. Forty-five percent of Allegiant Air’s planes were delayed, and Sun Country Airlines saw 23% of its flights delayed, according to the data.
The airlines did not provide details about how many flights were affected.
Microsoft said the outage began around 6pm ET on Thursday, with some customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the US Central region.
Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.
Meanwhile, Microsoft said it is investigating the issue affecting a range of Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for further details about the outage.
