LSE Joins Banks, Airlines in Cascade of Global Disruptions

(Bloomberg) — A series of technical glitches disrupted services at airlines, banks and the London Stock Exchange 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.

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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. KLM said it was suspending most flights because of a global computer outage. 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.

Microsoft Cloud Software Outage: Live Updates

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.

The cascading service failures on Friday underscored how a growing proportion of businesses have moved services and support processes online in recent years, seeking to cut costs or better unify their global arms. In 2017, a series of errors within Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud service — which like Azure underpins a big chunk of the world’s online platforms — disrupted the operation of tens of thousands of websites including ESPN.com.

Click here for a liveblog of the outages.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was looking into the situation, while Crowdstrike representatives weren’t immediately available for comment outside normal business hours, and calls to their main number in Japan went unanswered.

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 11 p.m. New York time.

“We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact,” Microsoft said in its latest status update.

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, Narita, Singapore 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.

–With assistance from Mayumi Negishi.

(Updates with reports of a Crowdstrike glitch from the third paragraph)