Microsoft stock falls as outage grounds flights, Azure services impacted

Investing.com-- Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) experienced an outage in its Azure and Office365 services which saw at least two low-cost U.S. airlines ground multiple flights on late-Thursday, with services still remaining suspended into early-Friday. 

Microsoft stock fell 1.8% in pre-market trade Friday.

Frontier Airlines said its systems were gradually normalizing on early-Friday and that it was in the process of resuming flights, after its systems were affected by what it described as a “Microsoft outage which is also affecting other companies.” 

Frontier had grounded several flights, as did Sun Country Airlines, although the latter said that one of its “information vendors” was experiencing a global outage.

Microsoft reported an outage in its Azure cloud computing platform on late-Thursday, and that it was working to restore service. 

A note on the company’s website attributed the Azure outage to 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.”

The firm said it had completed mitigation efforts with the Azure service, but did not specify whether the service was back online. 

The company’s service health status website showed its 365 service was also experiencing “degredation,” and that users will be unable to access several Microsoft 365 apps and services. 

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.