Microsoft Faces Service Outage Impacting Azure and Office365, Disrupting U.S. Airlines

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) faced a significant disruption in its Azure and Office365 services, causing at least two low-cost U.S. airlines to ground multiple flights late Thursday. The issues continued into early Friday. As a result, Microsoft's stock dropped more than 1% in pre-market today.

Frontier Airlines reported that its systems were slowly returning to normal on early Friday and that it was in the process of resuming flights. The airline stated the problem stemmed from a "Microsoft outage," which was also affecting other companies.

Similarly, Sun Country Airlines grounded several flights, attributing the issue to a global outage experienced by one of its "information vendors."

Microsoft acknowledged the outage on its Azure cloud computing platform late Thursday and was actively working to restore service. According to their note, the Azure outage was due to a "configuration change" that disrupted connectivity between storage and compute resources, affecting downstream Microsoft 365 services reliant on these connections.

Although Microsoft stated it had completed mitigation efforts for the Azure service, it did not confirm whether the service was fully restored. The company’s service health status website indicated ongoing "degradation" in its 365 service, noting that users were unable to access several Microsoft 365 apps and services.