Earlier this evening Frontier was forced to ground flights due to a Microsoft system outage. According to a tweet sent by the airline, which I am unable to link because I’ve apparently been blocked by the airline even though I’ve never interacted with them, booking, check-in, boarding pass access, and some flights were impacted.
The outage and subsequent grounding of flights seems to have stemmed from a Microsoft Azure issue. The issue was first reported around 6:00p Eastern time on the Microsoft Azure website. In addition to Frontier, the outage seems to have impacted Allegiant and Sun Country as well, though to a lesser extent.
Frontier reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and had them issue a ground stop, pausing the airlines departures across the country. According to FlightAware, at the time of writing, the airline has cancelled 143 flights and a further 205 are delayed. Combined, this represents roughly 45% of the airline’s operations.
Just after 10:00p Eastern, the FAA removed the airline’s ground stop and operations were allowed to resume. Now we just have to wait and see, or rather you’ll have to tell me since I can’t see their social media, how long it takes for operations to return to normal.
Summary
Frontier was forced to issue a ground stop and pause all flights due to a Microsoft Azure outage earlier today. While the issue affected fellow ultra-low-cost carriers Allegiant and Sun Country, Frontier appears to have taken the brunt of the issues. As the outage happened towards the end of the day, we will have to wait and see the downstream effects of this on tomorrow’s flights due to crews and aircraft being out of position.
