American Airlines grounds all flights due to ‘communications issue’ amid reports of hospital and 911 systems outages as Microsoft says it is taking ‘mitigating actions’

Major US carrier American Airlines halted all flights on Friday morning due to a communications problem. Hospitals and 112 services also reported system failures due to concerns about a large-scale Microsoft server crash.

American Airlines did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment on the ground stop.

Customers flying with the airline took to social media to say their pilots had told them all systems were down and all planes had to remain grounded until they came back online.

Many complained of being stranded on planes waiting on the tarmac before departure or after landing at their destination.

Social media also saw a flurry of reports from medical staff across the country that electronic health records (EHRs) had crashed, raising fears that Microsoft systems worldwide were experiencing outages.

In Australia, IT security firm Crowdstrike today circulated a recorded phone message saying it was aware of reports of crashes in Microsoft’s Windows operating system, as employees at Sydney and Melbourne airports reported a system outage.

Images of self-checkout machines, ATMs and all sorts of other technologies displaying error messages were shared on social media.

Microsoft said this morning that it is taking “mitigating measures” following the service issues, but provided no further information.

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Major banks, corporations, newsrooms and television networks are experiencing disruptions to service delivery.

“We have activated our contingency plans and deployed additional staff to our terminals,” a statement from Sydney Airport said.

‘If you are traveling today, please make sure you arrive at the airport in plenty of time and check with your airline about the status of your flight.’

Australia’s three largest airlines – Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin – have been affected by the disruptions.

This comes hours after the operations of several budget airlines, including Frontier, were hit by an outage in the Microsoft cloud on Wednesday and Thursday.

Microsoft said Thursday that it is investigating issues with its cloud services in the Central America region that caused several flights to be grounded and canceled.

Airlines Frontier, Allegiant and SunCountry reported disruptions that affected operations.

Frontier said a “major technical outage at Microsoft” had temporarily affected operations, while SunCountry said a third-party vendor had disrupted booking and check-in facilities. The company was not named.

“The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue,” Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN. Allegiant did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Frontier canceled 147 flights and delayed 212 on Thursday, according to data tracker FlightAware. Forty-five percent of Allegiant planes were delayed, while Sun Country delayed 23 percent of its flights, the data shows.

The companies did not provide details on the number of flights affected.

Microsoft said the outage began around 6:00 p.m. ET on Thursday, with some customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.

Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.

Microsoft also said it is investigating an issue affecting several Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for more details about the outage.

Other affected operators included Allegiant and SunCountry.

Microsoft said there was a temporary outage in its Azure cloud software, causing an disruption to “service management operations and service connectivity or availability” in the Central US region.

However, American Airlines was not affected by the outage, the company said earlier in a statement to Reuters, suggesting the airline was dealing with a different problem.