A huge technology outage has disrupted global businesses and institutions in multiple countries, throwing airports, airlines, rail companies, government services, banks, stock exchanges, supermarkets, telecoms, health systems and media outlets into chaos.
Microsoft has said that a service outage is preventing Microsoft 365 users from accessing several apps and services worldwide. According to the company’s Service Health Status page, “a configuration change” in a part of their Azure backend workloads is causing “interruption between storage and compute resources”, leaving several Microsoft 365 apps unusable.
Experts attributed the actual disruption to CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software is used by industries around the world to protect against hackers and outside breaches. The problem appeared to result in crashes of machines running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Essentially the outage happens as you’re sitting in front of your terminal. If your terminal is a Microsoft Windows terminal, it suddenly goes to a blank blue screen. It’s called the ‘blue-screen-of-death’ error. You are locked out of your operating system.
Microsoft has been quick to acknowledge the issue and said they “remain committed in treating this event with the highest priority and urgency while we continue to address the lingering impact for the remaining Microsoft 365 apps that are in a degraded state.”
Microsoft seems to have restored some services like Microsoft Defender, Intune, OneNote, and SharePoint Online, but tools like PowerBI, Fabric, Teams, Purview, and Viva Engage are still down. While Teams users are unable to access group chats, presence and user registration, PowerBI service is currently available in only read-only mode.
The outage has rippled far and wide, with transport systems around the world being hit the hardest.
Flight operations affected worldwide
The cloud service also went in the Central U.S. region, causing several airlines like Frontier Airlines to cancel 147 and delay 212 flights. Sun Country and Allegiant also said that they had to delay 45 per cent and 27 per cent of their total flights.
In India, Spicejet, IndiGo, Air India, Vistara and Akasa Air are reportedly facing technical difficulties affecting booking, check-in, and flight updates. As a temporary measure, affected Indian airlines are handing out hand-written boarding passes for flights.
Apart from Delhi and Mumbai airports, the Microsoft outage is also reportedly affecting flight operations at Berlin airport, all Spanish airports, Japan’s Narita airport and Singapore’s Changi airport. In a post on X, Melbourne Airport said that they are also experiencing a “global technology issue” which is currently impacting check-in procedures for some airlines.
In response to the widespread outage, the Indian aviation ministry is asking affected airline operators to inform passengers about delays and cancellation via SMS.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Ashiwini Vaishnaw said the government has reached out to Microsoft who is currently working on resolve the issue. CERT, India’s Computer Emergency Response Team has also issued a technical advisory and the National Informatics Centre network remains unaffected.
