Sky News goes off air for hours due to global Microsoft outage

The UK-based media outlet Sky News was forced to go off-air for around three hours on Friday morning following a global Microsoft outage. Viewers were left with a stock footage, after which the channel changed the screen to an apology.

“We apologise for the interruption to this broadcast. We hope to restore the transmission of Sky News shortly,” the apology message read.

One of the presenters, Jacquie Beltrao, posted a picture with her fellow colleagues on X (formerly known as Twitter) and wrote a message for the viewers: “We’re obviously not on air—we’re trying.”

Meanwhile, viewers responded to the post, waiting for the news channel to resume the broadcast.

“Have you tried switching it off and back on again? Hope you’re back on air soon,” one of the users wrote. While, another X user said: “Missing my Sky News fix this morning”.

Also read: Microsoft's massive global outage: Bank services across the world halt

A major outage in Microsoft's cloud services caused massive disruptions to users, flight operations, and media houses. Several flights were cancelled or delayed, leading to inconvenience for the travellers.

As the outage hit, Akasa Airlines announced that some of its online services would be temporarily unavailable at the Mumbai and Delhi airports, while IndiGo said that its systems were also impacted by the outage. Spicejet also issued a statement saying it is facing a technical issue in providing flight updates.

The US-based Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings Inc., grounded flights for over two hours and attributed the cause to issues with Microsoft’s services.

Meanwhile, Microsoft said that its outage started at around 6 pm ET, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region. Issuing a statement, the company said that it is investigating the issue.

“Aware of this issue and have engaged multiple teams…We have determined the underlying cause,” it said.

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