Amazon Web Services outage hits airlines, disrupting check-in

Airline websites, including those for Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, were affected during Monday’s hourslong disruption of Amazon Web Services, the massive cloud computing provider, with some customers complaining they were unable to access flight check-in functions or their reservations.

At 5:27 a.m. ET, Amazon said: “We are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests. We will continue to provide additional information.”

The company had said earlier Monday on its AWS dashboard that its customers were experiencing “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”

United responded to a customer on X on Monday that it was “experiencing a system glitch affecting our online tools.”

United told CNBC some of its internal systems were temporarily affected by the outage and that it was using backups to end the disruption. The airline said “our teams are working to get our customers on their way.”

Delta said mid-morning it had some “minor” delays on Monday because of the outage but that it did not “anticipate any significant customer impact moving forward as a result of this event.”

Flight delays worldwide were minimal on Monday morning, according to a FlightAware tally.

Some reservations were showing up on airline apps, while customers complained on social media that they couldn’t check in or drop off bags, for several hours.

A massive CrowdStrike outage in July 2024, due to a botched software update, took thousands of Microsoft Windows systems offline, disrupting air travel and other industries around the world. Delta said the disruption forced it to cancel more than 5,000 flights and cost it more than $500 million in revenue and compensation for passengers, among other expenses.

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