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Major United States carriers ground flights amidst worldwide cyber outage

Leading U.S. airline companies consisting of Delta, United and American provided ground stops on Friday citing communication issues, as a

worldwide outage

roiled operations throughout a large swathe of industries around the world.

American Airlines, however, later said in a declaration it had re-established operations. Frontier and Spirit too cancelled regulations to ground aircrafts.

It was unclear if the groundings reported by the major U.S. airlines were connected to failures at Microsoft and cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike that impacted banking, health care and a number of other sectors.

Smaller gamers Frontier Airlines, Allegiant and SunCountry had earlier reported outages.

While American, Delta and United, the leading three U.S. airlines, had previously said a technology problem with a third-party vendor impacted them without naming the supplier, Frontier said that a significant Microsoft technical outage struck its operations temporarily.

The Allegiant website is currently not available due to the Microsoft Azure concern, Allegiant said in a statement to CNN. It did not react to ' request for a comment.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration stated in an emailed statement it was closely keeping an eye on the technical problem affecting IT systems at U.S. airline companies and that several airlines had requested its help with ground stops.

U.S. Secretary of Transport Pete Buttigieg stated the department was keeping track of flight cancellation and delay issues at Frontier, including that it will hold the business and all other airlines to their responsibilities to meet the requirements of travelers.

An overall of 518 flights were cancelled, with over 720 delayed, since 5:58 am ET on Friday, according to information tracker FlightAware.

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

Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, releasing, and handling applications and services.

Individually, Microsoft stated it was examining a problem affecting numerous Microsoft 365 apps and services.

(source: Reuters)