(July 19): A series of technical glitches disrupted services at airlines, banks and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) on Friday, an unusually widespread cascade of failures that erupted from the US to Asia after Microsoft Corp reported an outage across its online services.
McDonald’s Corp, United Airlines Holdings Inc and the LSE Group were among the major companies to disclose a variety of issues with communications to customer service. They were the more prominent of a plethora of corporations from Japan to India and the US to report glitches with their operations. It was unclear what triggered the issues, which coincided with Microsoft’s disruptions.
Several newspapers reported at least some of the problems stemmed from CrowdStrike Holdings Inc cybersecurity software. Australia’s AGL Energy Ltd said in a post on X it was currently experiencing system issues due to a CrowdStrike outage.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was looking into the situation, while Crowdstrike representatives weren’t immediately available for comment outside normal business hours, while calls to their main number in Japan went unanswered.
Hi AxelHappy,
We're currently experiencing system issues due to the CrowdStrike outage. We apologise for any difficulties you've had reaching us by phone or online.
Thank you for your understanding.
— AGL (@AGLEnergy) July 19, 2024
The first glitches emerged in the US late on Thursday, blamed on a failure of Microsoft services including Azure and 365. Denver-based Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings Inc, grounded flights for over two hours. The airline lifted a nationwide pause on departures and started the process of resuming flights from 11pm New York time.
The LSE Group, which operates the London stock exchange, said it’s experiencing a global technical issue preventing news from being published. In Asia, Japanese users began reporting glitches with services including Microsoft 365 — the company’s internet-based office software suite — in the afternoon. Airlines at Mumbai and Hong Kong airports reverted to manually checking in passengers.
The latest failures came right after Microsoft said it had resolved an Azure cloud services outage. The company’s status pages had earlier showed Azure and Microsoft 365 experienced problems for several hours.
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