A series of technological failures on Friday halted services across airlines, banks, and the London Stock Exchange (LSE), following a widespread outage of Microsoft Corp.’s online services, according to various media reports.
The LSE Group, which operates the London stock market, reported a global technical issue affecting its news service. The LSE stated that its RNS news service was experiencing a third-party worldwide technical fault that prevented news from being published on its website. Technical staff are working to restore the service, while other LSE services continue to operate normally.
The problems began in the United States late on Thursday, with Microsoft services such as Azure and Microsoft 365 reported as the source of the issues. Frontier Airlines, a subsidiary of Frontier Group Holdings Inc., grounded flights for more than two hours due to problems linked to Microsoft’s online services. The airline lifted its statewide suspension of departures and resumed flight operations at 11 p.m. New York time.
According to a Reuters report, Microsoft said the outage started at 6 p.m. ET on Thursday, impacting Azure services in the Central US. Azure is a cloud computing platform providing tools for creating, deploying, and managing applications and services. Microsoft is investigating the issue, which affects several Microsoft 365 apps and services.