Atlanta airport faces widespread communications outage, thousands of passengers in limbo, flights grounded – WABE

A widespread Microsoft communications outage is wreaking havoc around the world and grounding flights Friday morning at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has ordered flights from major U.S. airlines, including Delta Air Lines, United and Atlanta-based American, to be grounded. The shutdown is halting flights at other airports around the world 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 to customers affected by the outage.

This means that thousands of travelers are currently stranded at Atlanta airport. Social media posts show completely blue screens with no flight information broadcast in all terminals.

Hartsfield-Jackson Senior Director of Communications Andy Gobeil joined WABE’s “Morning Edition” live Friday to update listeners and travelers on the latest news and how the airport is handling the unprecedented outage.

Microsoft says 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 a disruption between storage and compute resources, leading to connectivity outages that impacted downstream Microsoft 365 services that depend on these connections.”

A flaw in a software update is believed to be the cause of the underlying problem.