Global Microsoft Software Outage Disrupts Businesses and Airlines

Massive Microsoft software failure has impacted millions in the world; disrupting business IT systems of several firms; banking facilities, global airlines. All check-in kiosks for IndiGo, Akasa, and SpiceJet airlines are offline in India. This blackout that started in the morning has caused massive disruptions, the Mumbai airport has the worst experience. The effect we assessed is moderate and specifically in Terminal 2 the delays and disruptions have affected Delhi airport.

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The blackout situation has led to grounding and cancellations of flights in the United States of America. The matter is claimed to be connected to a US-based cybersecurity firm known as CrowdStrike and a ‘falcon sensor’ that is integrated into numerous business computers to acquire security information. A number of instances have been reported with crashes on the Windows hosts where the Falcon sensor has been installed resulting to bug checks and blue screen errors that have been reported to the CrowdStrike team. The organization said that the engineering groups are rolling up their sleeves to address the problem.
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Comparing to other countries, a large no of users have complained about Microsoft service unavailable in Downdetector in India. Even other countries have not been left out by these IT issues as outages have been felt as far as New Zealand and Japan.

Microsoft Windows shut down was all over the news and according to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) there is an advisory issued about it. To that extent, the advisory pointed out that ‘Windows hosts associated with the CrowdStrike agent Falcon Sensor’ are down and crashing due to a recent update. The impact to the Windows hosts is what the user described as Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) related to Falcon Sensor. CrowdStrike has rolled back the change in the latest update but if hosts are still crashing the better option is to boot Windows to Safe Mode or WRE and check the latest update on the CrowdStrike portal.

Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said his Ministry is in touch with Microsoft and its associates, for the global outage. In response to my question, he agreed that the source of the problem has been ascertained, and patches have been pushed out to address the problem. The Minister also enlightened the fact that NIC network is not inaccessible.