Atlanta airport navigates widespread comms outage, thousands of passengers in limbo, flights grounded
A widespread Microsoft communications outage is wreaking havoc across the globe and grounded flights Friday morning at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground-stop for major U.S. airlines, including Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines, United and American. The outage is halting flights at other airports globally and impacting banks and other businesses and services.
Delta resumed some flights shortly before 8 a.m. The airline is working to issue travel waivers for customers affected by the outage.
That means thousands of travelers at Atlanta’s airport are currently stuck. Social media posts show completely blue screens with no flight information broadcast throughout the terminals.
Hartsfield-Jackson’s senior director of communications, Andy Gobeil, joined WABE’s “Morning Edition” live Friday to brief listeners and travelers on the latest and how the airport is navigating this unprecedented outage.
Microsoft reports its team is currently investigating the issue affecting its Microsoft 365 apps and services, saying in a statement that a “configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.”
A defect in a software update reportedly caused the underlying issue.