Widespread Microsoft Outage Impacts Airlines, Banks

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Bloomberg Jul 19 04:00 · 131.6k Views

A series of technical glitches disrupted services at airlines, banks and the London Stock Exchange on Friday, an unusual cascade of failures that erupted from the US to Asia after Microsoft Corp. reported an outage across its online services. Kriti Gupta, Anna Edwards and Guy Johnson report.

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Transcript

  • 00:00 Talking of wild events,
  • 00:01 this Microsoft thing feels like it's it's,
  • 00:04 it's a hard to quantify at this point.
  • 00:06 There has been an outage.
  • 00:07 They're talking about it being in a degraded, some of the 365
  • 00:10 sweep being in a degraded state.
  • 00:12 There are technical issues popping up in strange places this morning
  • 00:16 that I
  • 00:17 don't know whether we can join the dots yet or not on,
  • 00:20 but it feels like there's something bigger afoot.
  • 00:23 Gonna love the cloud, haven't you?
  • 00:24 Yeah.
  • 00:25 I mean, if you're one business and your IT goes down,
  • 00:28 that's just you.
  • 00:28 But if everybody, if lots of businesses are attached to the same
  • 00:32 to the same IT infrastructure and that goes down, then there's a bigger problem.
  • 00:35 And so that's what we seem to be seeing today.
  • 00:37 Microsoft saying that's yes, they remain in the degraded state to use those words.
  • 00:41 We're also seeing
  • 00:43 several airlines and airports globally facing widespread
  • 00:46 IT issues.
  • 00:47 Yeah.
  • 00:48 And there, there, there do seem to be links between these stories.
  • 00:50 The has already told us this morning they're investigating technical issues regarding RNS statements.
  • 00:55 Where the news flow will be, will will come quickly from them is
  • 00:59 not clear.
  • 00:59 And we should remember to say that the context is important here.
  • 01:01 You mentioned some of the airlines as well.
  • 01:02 Frontier Group was one of the ones that was initially having issues.
  • 01:05 I think you mentioned the Cathay Pacific as
  • 01:07 as well.
  • 01:07 Remember, this had happened a couple of hours ago and it was since reported resolved in in in the meantime.
  • 01:13 And you're also now seeing a headline come out of ABC, for example, saying American Airlines and Delta
  • 01:18 ask that the USFAA ground all flights.
  • 01:21 So this is turning into a, a more global issue
  • 01:23 that that is if we're seeing and we've got United now saying it, United Airlines ground
  • 01:29 ground stop all flights.
  • 01:31 This is according to an AT from the ATC, so from air traffic control FAATC advisory in the United States.
  • 01:37 That's not even from another ground stop is a, is a, we've seen ground stops before.
  • 01:41 This is a huge issue.
  • 01:43 If we are seeing basically the US domestic fleet, international fleet potentially being grounded as well,
  • 01:48 absolutely enormous.
  • 01:49 We've seen this in the past, the
  • 01:51 we have seen the technical systems in the US falling over for a relatively minor part of the system
  • 01:57 being not being, I think it was a pilot of updates
  • 02:00 in the past and that had a huge impact.
  • 02:02 Yeah, well, this brings us back a little bit too.
  • 02:04 And, and I think I was on location actually in LaGuardia when that happened.
  • 02:07 Well, it brings us back to the, the whole SW story and what kind of issues are unveiled from, from, from that kind of grounding.
  • 02:13 Yeah.
  • 02:13 It's interesting as well that some
  • 02:15 time ago, in fact about an hour and a half ago, we seem to be getting the message from Microsoft that this has all been resolved.
  • 02:20 Yeah.
  • 02:21 And then we get the update that they remain in a degraded state.
  • 02:25 So, you know, good to hear that Microsoft is working on these issues, but clearly there was some uncertainty as to whether there was still a problem.
  • 02:30 And it seems that there still
  • 02:32 is.
  • 02:32 Turkish Airlines also giving updates.
  • 02:34 Sorry if you mentioned that already critically.
  • 02:36 No, no,
  • 02:36 but but saying that they
  • 02:38 are taking action to resolve the issues there.
  • 02:40 So, yeah, the tentacles of this one
  • 02:42 seem to go far.
  • 02:44 Yeah.
  • 02:45 And I don't think yet we fully understand the the implications of all of this.
  • 02:48 If you start grounding aircraft globally,
  • 02:51 it's not just today
  • 02:52 that this will be in effect for.
  • 02:53 This will have a lasting effect throughout the weekend.
  • 02:56 This will take a long time to resolve as soon as the schedules start to get messed up,
  • 03:00 then then you have got a lasting problem that lasts hours and days.
  • 03:04 So now Delta as well then we're getting that update that official news as well.
  • 03:09 Delta Airlines ground stop all flights FAA advisory.
  • 03:13 So right off the bat, two of the, the five major carriers in, in in the states,
  • 03:17 and I should mention, of course it's nighttime in the state.
  • 03:19 So there isn't that many flights about right now.
  • 03:22 But the minute they will, people are starting to get up, it'll be a couple morning flights that are not going to be happening.
  • 03:27 So that that news will start to have a ripple effect in a,
  • 03:30 in a big way.
  • 03:31 You've got inbound flights as well.
  • 03:32 They're going to be coming in.
  • 03:33 It's unclear at this point what the technical issue is going to be in terms of where the problem lies.
  • 03:38 Is it is it moving aircraft around the terminal?
  • 03:41 Is it check in?
  • 03:42 Is that the problem?
  • 03:43 Is it something to do with safety or is it simply just the inability to check passengers if we don't know and we can emphasize, we still don't know how much of this connected to the issues over at the London Stock Exchange or even the Microsoft
  • 03:54 issues that we saw in 365.
  • 03:56 As our our colleagues who are looking into this story tentatively linking all of this.
  • 04:00 So saying, there's a
  • 04:01 a series of technical glitches and unusual cascade of failures that erupted from the US to Asia after Microsoft reported an out outage across its online services.
  • 04:11 So there is a sense that these are connected, but we will wait for, of course, official confirmation.