Nothing short of a Global digital catastrophe unfolded today, as a major glitch in Microsoft’s cloud server rendered critical services useless. Impacted services, at the time of reporting and as per user reports, include domestic airlines across several countries including the US, Europe, India and others. Stock exchanges, such as the London Stock Exchange, also reported issues in trading.
On personal computing front, several users are reporting the infamous ‘blue screen of death’ that has become synonmous whenever there is a glitch in Microsoft Windows. While Microsoft says that the issue has now been resolved, several users are still continuing to report the blue screen of death.
The outage comes on the heels of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike also suffering a major outage resulting from an issue with its latest update, the company told NBC. CrowdStrike is now in the process of rolling back that update globally. Microsoft, in a message, later confirmed that the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ error is being caused due to the recent CrowdStrike update.
Crowdstrike shares have since fallen nearly 12% due to the update which caused this outage, which it is now rolling back globally.
Several airports, across major aviation hubs such as the U.S., India, Germany and others have reported issues in computer systems that issue boarding passes and baggage tags. Aircraft operations, such as landing and take-offs, remain delayed or cancelled across most airports. However, in-air operations remain unaffected. Media reports have been showing manual, handwritten boarding passes being issued to flyers with long queues bound to result in flight delays.
In an update at 3:55 a.m. ET, Microsoft 365 said on social platform X: “Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress.” The Redmond giant had earlier said that its outage started with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.
In the Media industry too, broadcasters have reported outages.
UPDATE 18:04 IST
As of now, services continue to remain impacted. Microsoft has now issued a statement, saying that it is issuing a fix soon. CrowdStrike CEO President & CEO George Kurtz has issued the following statement, “CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated 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.”
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