Microsoft to investigate global cloud outage after airlines were forced to ground flights

A huge Microsoft cloud outage has been causing disruptions across the globe.

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

It's said to be used by almost 70 percent of organizations worldwide for their cloud services.

With this in mind, the outage has caused chaos across the globe - including several US airlines being forced to cancel and ground flights.

A Microsoft outage has been affecting several countries. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Airlines such as American and Delta, UAL and Allegiant Air were affected by the technical issue, as well as Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings and SunCountry.

According to the New York Post, Frontier canceled 147 flights on Thursday (July 18) and delayed 212 others.

The airline has since stated that it's in the process of resuming normal operations after Microsoft revealed earlier today (July 19) that its cloud services had been restored, CNBC News said.

The outage is reported to have started at 6pm ET yesterday, and while some parts of the US have seen services resume, others are still affected.

According to the Azure status site, Microsoft is investigating the matter.

Frontier Airlines were among the airlines impacted over the cloud outages. (Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

"We are aware of this issue and have engaged multiple teams," a statement posted yesterday began. "We’ve determined the underlying cause. A backend cluster management workflow deployed a configuration change causing backend access to be blocked between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources in the Central US region.

"This resulted in the compute resources automatically restarting when connectivity was lost to virtual disks. Mitigation has been confirmed for all Azure Storage clusters, the majority of services are now recovered.

"A small subset of services is still experiencing residual impact. Impacted customers will be continuing to communicate through the Azure service health portal."

Azure is said to be used by almost 70 percent of organizations worldwide. (Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

While services are back up and running in the US, the likes of the UK and Australia are still facing issues.

Both banks and airlines in the two countries have been affected as a result of the outage, as well as some doctor's practices in England.

PA reported that one British-based health center said that 'all practices in the UK using the NHS commissioned GP computer system EMIS are currently without access to their IT systems'.

Sky News has also been knocked off air as a result of the ongoing outage in the country.

Meanwhile in Australia, some stores have resulted to taking cash-only payments because of the Microsoft outage impacting digital payment systems.

Countries like India and Japan are also reported to have been affected.

UNILAD have approached Microsoft for comment.

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