Microsoft Azure outage disrupts Alaska Air, Hawaiian Airlines systems

A global outage affecting Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform disrupted services for Alaska Airlines and other major companies Wednesday, just days after the airline experienced its own IT system failure that grounded flights across the country.

What we know:

Microsoft said users of its Azure cloud portal may be unable to access services such as Office 365, Minecraft and Xbox Live due to problems with its global content delivery network. The company said it deployed a fix Wednesday afternoon and is seeing signs of improvement, but is still working to fully restore all affected services.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment but acknowledged the issues on its Azure status page and social media accounts. Because so many websites and online platforms rely on Microsoft’s cloud services, outages like this one can have widespread effects.

Reports on Downdetector, a website that tracks online service disruptions, showed spikes in problems with Microsoft 365, Minecraft, Xbox Live, Copilot and other products. The outage came just hours before Microsoft released its quarterly earnings report.

Alaska Airlines confirms disruption to key systems

What they're saying:

Alaska Airlines said the Azure outage affected several of its systems, including its website.

"Due to a global outage impacting the Microsoft Azure platform where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted, we are currently experiencing a disruption to key systems, including our websites," the airline said in a post Wednesday morning on X, formerly Twitter.

"For our guests who are unable to check-in online due to the Microsoft Azure outage, please see an agent at the airport for a boarding pass, and allow for some extra time in the lobby," the airline said. "We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we navigate this issue."

Alaska said in an update that it is bringing systems back online Wednesday afternoon, with other services set to resume once Microsoft fully resolves the issue.

Recent Alaska Airlines IT issues

Dig deeper:

The Microsoft-related disruption comes less than a week after Alaska Airlines suffered its own IT outage that forced the carrier to ground planes for several hours and cancel more than 200 flights.

Last Thursday’s outage caused 229 flight cancellations and additional delays as the company worked to reposition aircraft and crews. Operations resumed the following day.

In that incident, Hawaiian Airlines—now part of Alaska Air Group—said its flights were operating normally.

Alaska Airlines experienced a similar issue in July, when it grounded flights for about three hours due to a hardware failure at a data center.

Broader cloud service impacts

Big picture view:

The Microsoft outage follows another major cloud disruption earlier this month, when an Amazon Web Services failure caused widespread issues across multiple industries, including social media, gaming, streaming and financial services.

Amazon remains the dominant provider of cloud computing infrastructure, while Microsoft ranks second globally.

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