Hundreds of travellers at Auckland International Airport are stranded after flight check-ins were suspended this evening due to a computer glitch.

One traveller told the Herald an announcement was being repeated over the public address system saying check-in was temporarily closed just after 7pm.

“It’s a bit chaotic,” Matt Anderson said.

“There are hundreds of people and none of them are moving.

“I was meant to be heading to Melbourne for the weekend, but it doesn’t look that’s going to happen now.”

Anderson, who was due to be flying with Jetstar, said customers of other airlines were also being stopped from checking in.

Hundreds of travellers at Auckland International Airport are stranded after flight check-ins were suspended this evening due to a computer glitch. Photo / Matt Anderson

Traveller Matt Anderson says an airline staff member told him an issue with Microsoft 365 was behind the disruption at Auckland International Airport. Photo / Matt Anderson

Anderson said he spoke with an airline staff member, wanting to know when he could fly, and she said there had been an issue with Microsoft 365.

“The repeated message just keeps saying, ‘Due to a computer malfunction, check-in has been temporarily suspended’.”

In a statement the airport said: “The check in system at Auckland Airport is currently experiencing technical difficulties, meaning check-in is slower than usual. Our technical teams are investigating, and we are working hard to resolve the issue as soon as possible. We appreciate delays can be frustrating, and we apologise to anyone who has been impacted.”

Earlier today, there was a confirmed issue with Microsoft 365.

Many New Zealand customers could not access Outlook and Teams this morning and Down Detector had 3200 reports of Microsoft outages around New Zealand at about 8.30am. By about 9.45am, customers across multiple organisations said services were coming back online.

The trouble came just hours after Microsoft suffered global problems due to a cyber attack.

A Microsoft spokeswoman told the Herald at 10.30am: “Microsoft is still investigating at this stage. We do have confirmation it’s not related to the previous DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attack, as it is only affecting New Zealand.”

On social media, the company said shortly before 2pm: “We confirmed with previously affected customers and through our internal telemetry that Microsoft 365 services in New Zealand are fully recovered.” The company has yet to comment on the cause.

Although Down Detector had a surge of Microsoft 365 outage reports at 8.30am as people arrived in offices, Microsoft first flagged a potential issue to corporate customers in a 2.05am update. The message said it was investigating “a potential issue with general access or latency [lag] issues with Microsoft 365 issues”.

Spark and 2degrees said a number of their customers were affected. One NZ said no customers on its network were impacted by the problems.

DDoS attack behind Microsoft disruption

On Wednesday, Microsoft suffered about 10 hours of global disruption.

The company said the “initial trigger event” for the outages was a DDoS attack – a spike in usage caused by millions of bots controlled by a hacker, flooding a service with traffic until it can no longer cope.

Data is not put at risk during a DDoS attack, but the spike in connection requests effectively blocks services to others. Security experts have likened it to sheep blocking a road.

- More to come