Microsoft outage hits airlines, stock markets, hospital services globally

A cloud services outage of Microsoft impacted several industries across the globe on Friday. According to the Reuters news agency, airlines, the stock market, businesses, and banks were severely affected due to the software outage. The services were affected due to technical problems at the US tech giant and American cyber security company CrowrdStrike.

The outage affected Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud services. Microsoft Windows is one of the clients of the CrowdStrike. Whereas Falcon is one of the main products of the CrowdStrike.

George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike said that the company is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.

Kurtz said they have identified the issue and a fix has been deployed.

"We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website," he said.

Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in a social media post that the Indian government is in touch with Microsoft regarding the global outage. Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) issued an advisory about the outage that occurred due to CrowdStrike agent Falcon Sensor.

The CERT-In said the issue occurred in the last update of CrowdStrike and the changes have been reverted by the CrowdStrike team. It advised to "boost window into Safe Mode or WIndow Recovery Environment; Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory; Locate the file matching "C-00000291*.sys", and delete it, and boost the host normally" to stay online to receive the Channel File Changes. It said that the preliminary cause was a configuration change that "resulted in connectivity failures".

Microsoft has said that it was probing into the matter.

Here's how the Microsoft outage affected the global businesses:

All major Indian airlines such as IndiGo, Vistara, SpiceJet, Air India, and Akasa Air experienced issues with online services due to problems with their service providers. The Indira Gandhi International airport mentioned that some of its services were temporarily impacted "due to global IT issues" on Friday. Besides, several major US airlines such as Delta, and American airlines were grounded due to communication issues. Besides, Australian airlines Virgin Australia and Qantas Airways were also impacted by massive tech disruption. Singapore's famed Changi Airport also faced IT disruption.

In Australia, banking and telecoms institutions such as ANZ, Westpac, Visa, and Optus were affected.

UK's major television channel Sky News was unable to broadcast after the outage.

Israel's health ministry said that the outage affected hospitals and other health services in the country. "This is not a cyber-attack but a malfunction" in one piece of software, affecting servers and computers.

Both the London Stock Exchange and the Malaysian Stock Exchange experienced disruption due to CrowdStrike Microsoft Windows. In India, some brokerages reported technical glitches. Such as 5paisa and IIFL Securities told clients that their systems were affected due to a cyber outage.