Tausi Insider

Travellers wait in the terminal as an Alaska Airlines plane sits at a gate at Los Angeles International Airport, on Jan. 11. STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images A computer outage at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration brought flights to a standstill across the U.S. on Wednesday, with hundreds of delays quickly cascading through the system, including at Canadian airports. The White House initially said that there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the outage that ruined travel plans for millions of passengers. President Joe Biden said Wednesday morning that he’s directed the Department of Transportation to investigate. Whatever the cause, the outage revealed how dependent the world’s largest economy is on air travel, and how dependent air travel is on an antiquated computer system called the Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM. Before commencing a flight, pilots are required to consult NOTAMs, which list potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potent...

Flight status boards at Harry Reid International Airport, in Las Vegas, on Jan. 11. John Locher/The Associated Press U.S. air travel returned mostly to normal Thursday, a day after a computer system that sends safety information to pilots broke down and grounded traffic from coast to coast. By midafternoon on the East Coast, about 150 flights had been cancelled and more than 3,700 delayed – much lower figures than on Wednesday, when more than 1,300 flights were scrubbed and 11,000 delayed. Attention turned to the federal agency where the technology failure apparently started hours before it inconvenienced more than 1 million travellers. The Federal Aviation Administration said a damaged database file appeared to have caused the outage in the safety-alert system. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised a thorough examination to avoid another major failure. “Our immediate focus is technical – understanding exactly how this happened, why the redundancies and the backups that we...

Microsoft MSFT-Q said on Wednesday it had recovered all of its cloud services after a networking outage took down its cloud platform Azure along with services such as Teams and Outlook used by millions around the globe. Azure’s status page showed services were impacted in Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Only services in China and its platform for governments were not hit. By late morning Azure said most customers should have seen services resume after a full recovery of the Microsoft Wide Area Network (WAN). An outage of Azure, which has 15 million corporate customers and over 500 million active users, according to Microsoft data, can impact multiple services and create a domino effect as almost all of the world’s largest companies use the platform. Businesses have become increasingly dependent on online platforms after the pandemic caused a shift to more employees working from home. Earlier, Microsoft said it had determined a network connectivity issue was oc...