Airline Systems Down: Azure Outage Affects Navitaire and Major Carriers

On Thursday night (18th), a widespread outage of Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing service, impacted Navitaire, the technology platform subsidiary of Amadeus that dozens of airlines worldwide use to manage various operational processes, causing several of them to be affected to varying degrees.

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Companies like Frontier Airlines, JetSMART, Vueling, Breeze Airways, and Sun Country Airlines communicated through their social media channels that their systems were down, preventing them from processing reservations, check-ins, or access to boarding passes, causing disruptions to their flights.

FlightRadar24 showed that at 2:28 AM GMT on Friday the 19th, only 15 Frontier Airlines planes were airborne, compared to 57 at the same time the previous day.

Just 15 Frontier flights airborne this evening, compared to 57 same time last night. https://t.co/gafKXzQNUE pic.twitter.com/AauC2tBO6N

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) July 19, 2024

In a statement to passengers, JetSMART said that it «is experiencing intermittent issues in delivering services related to check-in and reservation processes, among others,» inviting passengers with flights in the next 12 hours to arrive at the airport earlier.

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More airlines affected

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported at 9:57 AM GMT that they are closely monitoring the technical problem impacting IT systems on U.S. airlines. “Several airlines have asked the FAA for assistance with ground stops until the issue is resolved,” they said. The status can be followed at http://fly.faa.gov.

Aena indicated at 10:05 AM GMT that they are already recovering some of their systems and that all airports are operational, but with some processes slower than usual.

“During the early hours of the morning contingency systems were activated and some processes were managed manually to maintain operations that, for the moment, comply with the day’s schedule, although with some delays. Some airlines are rescheduling their operations”, they said.

According to data provided by Cirium, an aviation analysis company, around 110,000 commercial flights were scheduled for this Friday, of which at 10:00 AM GMT almost 1,400 had already been cancelled.

In the United States, more than 27,000 flights were scheduled to carry 3.7 million passengers. 512 had already been cancelled, representing 1.91% of the total, a figure Cirium said was significantly higher than usual at this time of day.

Of the 4,386 flights scheduled today in Germany, 92 departures have already been cancelled, while in France, out of 3,630 flights, 28 departures are cancelled.

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