[Update] Global Microsoft Outage Takes Toll On Indigo, Other Indian Airlines

Update | July 20, 12:45 PM

A day after the Microsoft outage wrecked havoc at a global level, the big tech company now claims to have managed to retrieve some of its more critical services. As of 12:02 PM on Saturday (July 20), Microsoft 365 Admin Center and Power Platform Admin Centre were recovered from the services and can be accessed. However, its cloud service Microsoft Azure is still suffering from a “service degradation”. 

Meanwhile, as of 11 AM today, the company updated that it has received reports of successful recovery from some customers attempting multiple restart operations on affected Virtual Machines. 

However, the outages are continuing to wreak havoc on industries at a global scale. “This gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain,” Tesla’s founder Elon Musk said in his post on the matter. 

Taking to X, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella addressed the issue and gave assurance that the tech major is working closely with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.

In India, the major impact from the outage was suffered by the airline industry. However, Civil aviation minister K Rammohan Naidu informed that India’s airline systems across airports have started working normally since 3 AM last night. 

“Flight operations are going smoothly now. There is a backlog because of disruptions yesterday, and it is getting cleared gradually. By noon today, we expect all issues to be resolved. We are constantly monitoring the operations at our airports and also with the airlines ensuring travel readjustments and refunds are taken care of,” Naidu’s statement read.

While the outage has hit airline operations in India, its impact also seeped into the brokerage business. Brokerages Angel One, 5paisa, and IIFL Securities took to X to inform users of the disruption, Others impacted by the widespread global computer outage include Motilal Oswal and Edelweiss Mutual Fund.

Besides, the impact was also felt in the automotive industry. In a regulatory filing, auto major Maruti Suzuki said, “A global IT issue affected several companies across several countries today. This problem was encountered in our company also.”

Even though the large-scale outage in Microsoft Services has impacted IT systems globally, the Reserve Bank of India released a statement yesterday clarifying that the Indian financial sector has largely been unaffected by the disruption. “Our assessment shows that only 10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions which have either been resolved or are being resolved… The Reserve Bank has issued an Advisory today to its Regulated Entities for taking necessary steps to remain alert and ensure operational resilience and continuity,” it said.

Original Story | July 19, 3:15 PM

Big tech Microsoft has suffered a major global outage in its services, primarily impacting users of its software offering Microsoft 365. The outage has barred users from accessing various Microsoft 365 apps and services. 

The company’s Service Health status website is flashing a “Service Degradation” message, and informs that Microsoft’s PowerBI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 admin centre are currently experiencing delay in access.

As of 2:00 PM, the company said that it had recovered several of its services, namely  Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft OneNote, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Windows 365, Viva Engage, and Microsoft Purview

“We’re continuing to see an improvement in service availability across multiple Microsoft 365 apps and services. We’re closely monitoring our telemetry data to ensure this upward trend continues as our mitigation actions continue to progress,” the company said in a statement. 

As a result of the outage, several Indian airlines are experiencing hurdles in several of their workflows, rendering booking, check-in and manage booking services “temporarily unavailable. Airlines facing delays include Akasa Air, Vistara, Indigo, and SpiceJet. 

One Indigo passenger who was due to fly from Hyderabad to Kolkata took to X to share that he got a handwritten boarding pass. 

The outage has also “temporarily” impacted Delhi’s Airport. “Due to the global IT issue, some of the services at the Delhi Airport were temporarily impacted. We are closely working with all our stakeholders to minimise the inconvenience to our flyers,” the Airport’s official X account posted. 

Addressing the reason behind this debacle, the tech major said that a configuration change in a portion of Microsoft’s 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.

Amid the outage, Union minister of electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw took to  inform that MEITY is in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage. “The reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue. CERT is issuing a technical advisory. NIC network is not affected,” his post read.

Meanwhile, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued an advisory saying that the issue’s severity was “critical”. The advisory ascertained that the outage has occurred due to CrowdStrike agent “Falcon Sensor” outages. It said that the outage has led users 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,” it added.

CrowdStrike is a Nasdaq-listed cybersecurity company based in Texas, US. It provides cloud workload protection and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services. Addressing the issue, CrowdStrike’s founder George Kurtz said that the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed.

“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,” his X post read.

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