Update 3:30PM IST: The Indian government is also in touch with Microsoft. Meanwhile, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued an advisory which says, “It has been reported that Windows hosts related to Crowd strike agent Falcon Sensor, are facing outages and getting crashed due to recent update received in the product. The concerned Windows hosts are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), related to Falcon Sensor. The issues occurred in the latest update of CrowdStrike and the changes have been reverted by the CrowdStrike Team.”
Original Story Below
A significant malfunction in Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure, has resulted in extensive disruption, impacting individuals and companies worldwide. The problem seems to stem from a critical software error, causing significant operational difficulties and financial setbacks. The outage has affected various airlines, leading to grounded planes and disrupted flight operations. Additionally, the technical glitch has adversely impacted TV channels globally, including those in Australia and the UK.
Microsoft has reported that its outage began around 6 PM ET on Thursday, affecting a subset of its customers who experienced issues with multiple Azure services in the Central U.S. region, but the impact is creating havoc globally. Azure is a cloud computing platform offering services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services. Separately, Microsoft announced it investigated an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Airline operations disrupted in India
Some of Akasa Airlines’ online services are temporarily unavailable at the Mumbai and Delhi airports due to infrastructure issues with their service provider. Passengers have been advised to check in at the airline’s counters. “Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in, and manage booking services, will be temporarily unavailable,” Akasa Airlines said in a statement on X.
“Currently, we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence request passengers with immediate travel plans to reach the airport early to check in at our counters. We sincerely regret the inconvenience and want to assure you that our teams are working with our service provider to resolve the same as soon as possible,” the airline added.
Then, SpiceJet is facing technical issues in providing updates on flight disruptions, while the airline is actively working to resolve the issue. “We’re currently facing a technical issue in updating flight disruptions. Our team is actively working to resolve this issue. We regret for any inconvenience caused and will update you once the issue is resolved. Thank you for your patience and cooperation,” said the airline.
IndiGo posted a Travel advisory on its X account stating that “Our systems are currently impacted by a Microsoft outage, which is also affecting other companies. During this time, booking, check-in, access to your boarding pass, and some flights may be impacted. We appreciate your patience.”
Delhi Airport posted on X that some of its services were temporarily impacted by the global IT outage. “We are closely working with all our stakeholders to minimise the inconvenience to our flyers,” the airport said.
Airlines Impacted Globally
American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Allegiant Air grounded flights less than an hour after Microsoft announced it had resolved a cloud services outage that had affected several low-cost carriers, as per Reuters.
The impact of the outages extended globally. In Spain, a “computer incident” was reported at all airports. Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned passengers of potential disruptions, stating that the issues would affect “all airlines operating across the Network,” although it did not provide specific details about the nature of the disruptions.
According to some reports online, Berlin Airport will also be suspending all its flights due to IT problems. However, an official confirmation is awaited.
Singapore’s Changi Airport, also one of the busiest in the world, says that the check-in process is being switched over to the manual method. “Due to a global outage affecting IT systems of many organisations, the check-in process for some airlines at Changi Airport is being managed manually,” the airport shared on X. “Changi Airport ground staff are providing assistance to passengers, especially those with an impending departure.”
Prague Airport has been affected by the check-in system outage, leading to delays for some departures from the Czech capital.
German airline Eurowings is reporting issues with its online check-in system, which is currently not working.
In Northern Ireland, Belfast International Airport is experiencing impacts from the outage, although flights remain operational.
Switzerland’s largest airport in Zurich has reported that planes are currently not allowed to land due to the outage.
Passengers at Airports worldwide are frustrated by flight delays. Monitors at Airports that update the status of flights are showing errors, as shown in videos and photos shot by people at the Airports. Some passengers claim to have been stuck at the Airports for over nine hours.
Windows Users Affected
Those who have laptops running on Windows OS have reported of sudden shutdown or rebooting of their machines due to the Microsoft glitch. Some are getting the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), disrupting their flow of work.
As per Microsoft’s Service Health Status updates, the root cause of the issue determined so far is “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads (that has) caused interruption between storage and compute resources, and which (has) resulted in connectivity failures.” This has affected “downstream (and dependent) Microsoft 365 services”, the company said.
The issue has been caused due to a CrowdStrike update that is related to the Falcon Sensor, due to which the BSOD appears. Microsoft has also mentioned some workaround steps to fix the glitch which are as follows:
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
- Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
- Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
- Boot the host normally.
Emergency Services Affected
“Due to a nationwide technology-related outage, many 911 and non-emergency call centres are not working correctly across the State of Alaska. If you have an emergency and 911 is not working in your area, you can call the following phone numbers directly,” Alaska Police wrote in a post on Facebook. There are several other states in the USA whose emergency services have also been adversely affected by the Microsoft glitch.
Banking Services Are Down
The Microsoft outage has also affected bank servers across the globe. “Due to an unexpected issue with an international service provider, we are currently experiencing nationwide service disruptions,” Capitec, South Africa’s biggest bank wrote on X.
State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender, said that it remains unaffected by the Microsoft glitch. “We are all fine,” SBI Chairman Dinesh Khara told PTI when asked about the impact of the global outage.
In addition, National Stock Exchange (NSE) on Friday said it has also not been impacted by the global outage of Microsoft systems.
Microsoft’s Response
Microsoft365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.” “Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress,” it said in a separate post.