Air Travel Grounded – Louisiana Passengers Call Your Airline

There appears to be a major IT issue involving several of the airlines that serve airports in Lafayette, Lake Charles, Shreveport, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge this morning. The issue is not just confined to Louisiana airports nor is it confined exclusively to the airline industry.

Since many of you have travel plans this weekend that involve air travel here is what we know as of 0300 A.M. CDT. American, Delta, and United have all issued ground stops this morning to their fleet captains and crews. The ground stop was issued just hours after Microsoft reported that it had resolved an issue with its cloud services.

Those Microsoft cloud service issues reportedly affected Frontier, Allegiant, and Sun Country Airlines late in the day on Thursday. The IT issue appears to have affected communications between the airlines' booking and flight monitoring operations. The issue on Wednesday forced Frontier to cancel 147 flights while delaying some 212 others.

The Associated Press reported that users of Microsoft 365 worldwide have reported issues and have been unable to access key services provided by that platform. The outage has reportedly been linked to a U.S.-based cyber security company, Crowdstrike.

The site tracking website DownDetector reported that outages have also been reported at VISA, ADT Security, and Amazon. There have also been reports out of Australia that suggest many businesses in that nation are experiencing IT outages and issues as well.

As far as the airline situation goes, as of this report Delta, American, and United have all petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration for a global ground stop. That means that flights in the air will stay in the air but no flights on the ground will be allowed to take off until the issue has been resolved.

We suggest you contact your carrier or open that carrier's App for the latest information. We checked the departures roster for New Orleans Louis Armstrong International and found only a few flights listed as "canceled" on the board. However, there were several flights that no longer had a departure time listed.

A similar status check of departures at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston Texas showed several flights rescheduled from Thursday but as of this report many of the scheduled departures were still listed as being "on time".

This is a developing storyand we will provide updates throughout the morning and the day. If you do have travel plans from any airport in Louisiana it is suggested that you contact your airline and verify your travel plans. Safe Travels.

05:25 A.M.  We have this update via ABC News concerning American Airlines and the FAA ground stop.

We also have this update from New Orleans via WAFB TV