Major US carriers restore some flight operations amid global cyber outage

By Shivansh Tiwary and Maria Ponnezhath

(Reuters) -Top U.S. carriers including Delta Air and United Airlines are restoring some operations on Friday after a technical issue related to an IT vendor forced multiple carriers to ground flights.

However, delays and cancellations were expected to persist throughout the day, as airlines try to fully recover from the impact of the outage that upended their flying schedules and affected thousands of passengers.

More than 2,200 flights were canceled across the U.S., with nearly 7,000 delayed, as of 1:23 pm ET on Friday, according to data tracker FlightAware.

Delta and United said they were resuming some flights but expected additional delays and cancellations. The airlines also issued travel waivers for impacted passengers.

The issue affected many separate systems, such as those used for calculating aircraft weight, checking in customers and phone systems in their call centers, United said in a statement.

Peer American Airlines, which had earlier issued a ground stop notice, said it had safely re-established operations. Budget carrier Southwest Airlines said it was not impacted by the outage.

Outages at Microsoft and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike hit banking, healthcare and a number of other sectors globally on Friday.

While American, Delta and United did not name the vendor, smaller carrier Frontier Airlines said a "major Microsoft technical outage" hit its operations temporarily.

The issue stemmed from a defect found in a CrowdStrike content update for Microsoft Windows hosts, the cybersecurity firm's CEO George Kurtz said on Friday.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said in an emailed statement it was closely monitoring the technical issue impacting IT systems at U.S. airlines and that several airlines had requested its assistance with ground stops.

Parcel delivery firm FedEx said it faced substantial disruptions throughout its networks, while peer United Parcel Service also warned of potential delivery delays.

Microsoft said its outage started at about 6 pm ET on Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central U.S. region.

Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.

(Reporting by Shivansh Tiwary, Maria Ponnezhath and Shivani Tanna ; Additional reporting by Chandni Shah, Nathan Gomes, Surbhi Mishra, Angela Christy and David Shepardson; writing by Abinaya Vijayaraghavan and Shubham Kalia; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Sriraj Kalluvila)