Microsoft outage hits users worldwide; airlines, banks, London Stock Exchange affected

Services offered by tech giant Microsoft, as part of its cloud-powered productivity platform 'Microsoft 365', suffered an outage globally on Friday, July 19. This adversely affected several banks, flights, bourses and other businesses.

The operations of the London Stock Exchange were disrupted due to the outage, reports said. However, the Indian exchanges - NSE and BSE - did not report any disruption.

Indian carriers, including Indigo, Akasa Air and SpiceJet, issued statements confirming that some of their services such as flight bookings and online check-ins have been disrupted. This, in turn, has reportedly affected operations at some of India's busiest airports including Mumbai and Delhi.

“Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable. Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence request passengers with immediate travel plans to reach the airport early to check-in at our counters," Akasa Air said in a statement issued on social media.

"We're currently facing a technical issue in providing updates on flight disruptions. Our team is actively working to resolve this issue. We regret for any inconvenience caused and will update you once the issue is resolved. Thank you for your patience and co-operation," SpiceJet posted on X.

In Australia, the Melbourne airport issued a statement to inform travellers that some of its check-in services were impacted. In Europe, a spokesperson of Germany's Berlin Brandenburg Airport said some flight operations had to be cancelled due to the "technical problem".

According to downdetector.in, the reports of Microsoft outage have been received from major cities of India, including New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. The reports peaked between 11 am and 12 noon.

Windows users took to social media to claim that they were experiencing the "Blue Screen of Death", or BSOD error, causing systems to shut down or restart unexpectedly.

Media, supermarkets, emergency services also hit

The operations of some of the major media houses were also disrupted. Sky News, one of the prominent broadcasters in the UK, went off air for some, whereas Australia's ABC News 24 also struggled to play news packages.

In the United States, the '911' emergency services were disrupted in several provinces.

According to reports, several supermarkets in the UK and Australia also paused operations as they were unable to access critical software systems supported by Microsoft 365.

What caused the outage?

A recent "CrowdStrike update" has been identified as the source of this issue, as per an advisory issued by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a wing under the Ministry of IT and Electronics.

CrowdStrike, a US-based cybersecurity provider, recently issued an update to "Falcon sensor", which is used in business computers to collect security data.

"It has been reported that Windows hosts related to CrowdStrike agent 'Falcon Sensor' are facing outages and 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," the CERT-In advisory said.

What Microsoft said

According to Service Health Status update page of Windows operator, the preliminary root cause of the issue is "a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads."

"This caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connection," the company noted.

"Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions," Microsoft added, in an update posted on X at 11:41 am (IST).

Which Microsoft services have been affected?

• Microsoft Teams: Users cannot use Microsoft Teams functions, including presence, group chats, and user registration.
• PowerBI: Users will notice that their service is read-only while we address impact.
• Microsoft Fabric: Users will notice that their service is read-only while we address impact.
• Microsoft 365 admin centre: Admins will be intermittently unable to access the Microsoft 365 admin centre, and any action may be delayed if accessible.
• Microsoft Purview: Users will see a delay in events being processed in Microsoft Purview.

"This issue may be impacting any user attempting to use various Microsoft 365 apps and services," Microsoft said.