Microsoft was down for 24 hours before it was "roughly restored"! The United States has another nationwide grounding of flights, and officials urgently want to clarify

Microsoft Microsoft experienced a global crash in the early morning of yesterday (13th), and officials said it was not a cyber attack. (Photo/Reuters)

Microsoft's Microsoft 365 suffered a global outage yesterday (13th), affecting its Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services, causing inconvenience to global enterprises, government agencies and educational institutions. Unexpectedly, Microsoft's fault has not been completely eliminated. Today (14th), a rare nationwide flight grounding was reported in the United States, which once made the outside world wonder whether the two were related. However, U.S. officials have come forward to clarify that the two incidents are not related.

Microsoft was down for nearly 24 hours and officially announced a large-scale recovery

This wave of major Microsoft outages began at around 2 a.m. on the 13th, Taiwan time. It was not until the early morning of the 14th, nearly 24 hours after the disaster lasted, that Microsoft announced that the fundamental problem had been repaired and services were returning to normal on a large scale. However, some regions and users may still encounter abnormalities.

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As for the cause of the failure, Microsoft explained that the problem was caused by an anomaly that occurred during a previous network capacity upgrade and surfaced after a recent network change. It emphasized that it had nothing to do with network attacks or AI agents. Microsoft has also issued a public apology and promised to release a complete investigation report later.

After Microsoft crashes, flights across the United States are grounded again

Just as Microsoft services were gradually being restored, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rarely ordered flights across the country to suspend takeoffs due to a communication system failure.

The FAA issued a nationwide grounding order at around 4 a.m. Taiwan time on the 14th. All flights preparing to take off are restricted, but aircraft already in the air can still continue to land. The cancellation was not announced until around 9 a.m. that day, and flights were grounded for more than four hours.

This is also the third time that flights across the country have been suspended in the United States since the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The last time occurred in January 2023.

It is reported that as many as 9,124 flights in the United States were delayed and 5,901 flights were cancelled. Even if the grounding order is lifted, a large number of flights will still be affected.

Are the two incidents related? U.S. officials deny

As two major system failures occurred one after another, the outside world focused on whether there was a connection. However, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that there is currently no evidence that the FAA grounding incident involves a cyber attack or other national security threats, and also emphasized that it has nothing to do with the outage of Microsoft services.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pointed out that the FAA failure was related to the old air traffic control system. Some switches and routers were overwhelmed due to excessive data volume, resulting in abnormal communication information between radar and aircraft. At present, the FAA has taken repair measures and flights have resumed taking off one after another. However, the complete cause of the communication failure still needs further investigation.

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