Originally Posted by
ORD2323
I was booked on a 2/4/26 flight but received this strange email. Looking at the reservation now, my original outbound is entirely gone and only my return remains.
I called the number in the email but the agent had no context and asked why I was trying to change my return - she couldn’t see the original flight and was annoyed that I was insisting this itinerary used to have more segments.
Calling the 1k desk and a nice rep shared “I saw something this morning [11/22/25] come out to all of us agents. It said….you know that Microsoft thing that happened last year that grounded all the flights…they’re doing that again so all flights before 9am on Feb 4 are cancelled“ - I don’t think a Cloudflare outage is schedule like that, but that’s all the context I got.
My cancelled flight is a daily international flight that operates year round departing a hub. It is scheduled and bookable every day in the calendar except 2/4/26. It also departs well after 9am. Flights to this destination departing from other hubs and landing at similar times are still operating and bookable.
My connection that departs and lands well before 9am however is also deleted from my itinerary, but also still operating and bookable.
This is not a one off flight but something about the specific day. I saw someone post on reddit yesterday about a 2/4/26 cancellation for a different route touching a different hub.
I can handle the rebooking but can anyone provide context on what the cause of this is?
Ultimately just curious because it’s very weird.
Adding onto my original post:The only pattern I see is some medium / long haul intl flights departing between ~2-3pm ET.
It’s not just wide bodies or hub departures (PLS-EWR 73M9 at 1430 is cancelled, along with its 1030 inbound)
Some before that window are fine (SFO-HND 772 at 1015 PT)
Short haul intl is fine (ORD-YVR 738 at 1305 CT)
Some long haul intl in that window is fine (EWR-LIM 752 at 1410 ET)
It's not an aircraft availability thing (The RT EWR-PLS-EWR is canceled, but the cancelled ORD-HND has the A?C's returnleg operating and an unrelated (from the A/C perspective) flight cancelled (see below))
So it’s not widespread like a “all flights before # pm are cancelled” (evidenced by SFO-HND), it’s not even all intl within a time window (evidenced by EWR-LIM), and it’s not wide bodies (evidenced by the PLS flight)
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Another example. The ORD-HND A/C cancelled on 2/4 usually comes from GRU then flies to HND, they returns right back to ORD (+1 day).
So the cancellation on 2/4 would also cancel the 2/5 flight.
Instead HND-ORD is cancelled on 2/4 but is operating on 2/5. So I assume the 78X from 2/3 is sitting in HND from arrival on 2/4 afternoon until 2/5 instead of a direct turn on the A/C.
The 1820 departure from HND on 2/4 is 420 ET, which falls well outside of the impacted 2-3PM ET range I’ve found.