New Delhi: A major technical outage in Microsoft’s cloud services caused Windows computers across countries to glitch and shut down unexpectedly Friday, affecting flight operations, television channels, media websites, and even banks. The resulting flight cancellations have stranded millions of air travelers globally, including in India.
The Microsoft cloud services offer a wide variety of services such as storage, network services, databases, analytics and more.
The Indian government is in touch with Microsoft on the issue. In a post on X, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Electronics and IT, said, “The reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue.”
He also wrote that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the cyber security arm of the Indian government, has issued an advisory, and that the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the tech arm of the government, has not been affected.
In its advisory issued, CERT-In said that the outage of Microsoft Windows was “due to CrowdStrike agent Falcon Sensor”, and termed it as “critical”.
“It has been reported that Windows hosts related to Crowd strike agent Falcon Sensor are facing outages and getting crashed due to recent updates received in the product. The concerned windows hosts are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) related to Falcon Sensor,” the advisory said.
It added that the issues occurred in the latest update of CrowdStrike and the changes have been reverted by the team of the US-based cybersecurity firm.
Maharashtra minister of state for civil aviation, Murlidhar Mohol, in an X post, said that the DGCA and the ministry of civil aviation are closely monitoring the situation. “We have instructed private airlines to promptly inform passengers about the disruptions. Our teams are working diligently to resolve the issue as quickly as possible to minimize inconvenience to passengers.”
Till now, this major global tech outage has affected several airlines including Akasa, SpiceJet and IndiGo, causing disruptions in flight operations at the Delhi and Mumbai airports. Globally, major US carriers, including American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines, issued ground stops due to communication issues.
The tech outage has also caused bank services in Australia and New Zealand, including in Australia’s largest Commonwealth bank, to get disrupted as they lost access to computer systems, said media reports.
In a statement issued on X, Microsoft wrote that it is “investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.”
Explaining the preliminary root cause, Microsoft wrote, “A configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.”
Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst and CEO of Greyhound Research, an enterprise IT research and advisory firm, told ThePrint that a lot of organisations that use Azure or AWS have to secure their endpoint, which includes laptops and workstations. Today, “a wrong command was added to the software called CloudStrike Falcon that caused the BSOD,” explained Gogia. “It is extremely critical because users are not able to access their applications and it is putting the entire operations on standstill.”
Commenting on the scale of this global outage, Gogia said that this can stretch to many people who use CloudStrike on the server end. Moreover, he said that on the endpoint, the ramifications are significant because even though a machine will be rebooted in a recovery or safe mode, Falcone does not get active.
“It opens itself to vulnerabilities on the network and hackers can virtually enter your network. So, right now, hackers who want to make a gold mine out of the situation will be doing their best to infiltrate networks all across the globe. And that can be a very expensive mistake for CloudStrike,” he said.
Gogia said that IT teams are currently trying to attempt to ensure that they safeguard their networks to avoid any breach of data. “They need to check their servers for any attacks. And they might even have to reinstall the entire operating system to ensure no malware has been installed while CloudStrike was not active in safe mode,” he added.
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Indian airlines hit
Major Indian airlines including Akasa Airlines have issued statements on their X accounts. Akasa announced that due to infrastructure issues with its service provider, some of its online services will be temporarily unavailable and that they are “following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports”.
Meanwhile, inundated with queries, India’s biggest airline IndiGo has requested customers to only call in case they are travelling in the next 24 hours.
Similarly, Spicejet, too wrote, that its team was “actively working to resolve this issue”.
In an X post, Delhi airport said, they were “closely working with all stakeholders to minimise the inconvenience to flyers”, and asked passengers to be in touch with the airline concerned or the help desk on ground for updated flight information.
Bengaluru airport issued a statement that airlines have taken proactive measures by initiating manual check-ins to ensure minimal disruption to passengers and flight schedules.
Social media abuzz
Sanjiv Kapoor, a seasoned aviation professional and former CEO of Vistara and Jet Airways wrote on X: “Due to major global system outage, all gate screens at DEL blank. Flights are being held at gate. Some gates boarding pax and holding on board, some flights holding pax at gate itself, which is better. Seems to be impacting many airports and airlines.”
In another post on X, he wrote that at Delhi airport’s T3 Terminal security, “every second bag was going through additional screening. Everything had to be out — not just laptops, phones, electronics and wires, but also keys, pens, toiletries. Might as well just unpack the whole carry-on minus clothes for the x-ray to begin with.”
An X user wrote that Windows laptops had “started crashing for several users across India. Reported on Grapevine by employees at Bain and Company, Microsoft, Deloitte and TCS in the last 10 minutes”.
Another user said, “The weekend has started early”.
One user wrote on X, “The Microsoft / CrowdStrike outage has taken down most airports in India. I got my first hand-written boarding pass today.”
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