A massive Microsoft outage has had a far-reaching impact on services across the globe and has disrupted operations in banks, stock exchanges and even the aviation sector. Approximately six hours after the outage was first reported, Microsoft tweeted, “Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress”.
The issue, related to Crowdstrike’s Falcon sensor, is causing Windows machines to crash with blue screen errors and get stuck in a recovery loop.
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Starting with the impact on airlines. In India, all major airlines such as IndiGo, SpiceJet, Akasa Air and Air India reported having issues with their systems after the news of the outage broke.
Several airports across India also highlighted their struggle with the issue. Delhi airport took to X to report it, saying,”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.”
Passengers globally faced flight delays, cancellations and hindrance while checking in amid the IT outage.
Some of the foreign airlines which were affected are – American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, Frontier Airlines and Air France, among others.
Not just Indian airports, but airports worldwide were hit by this far-reaching outage, causing people to report the consequences of it. Some of the airports which were affected are – New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Singapore, Madrid and Edinburgh.
Banks
From Australia to Germany to India, banks and financial institutions warned their customers of disruptions caused by the Microsoft outage. A Reuters report said that Australia’s largest bank Commonwealth Bank’s customers were unable to transfer money due to the service outage.
London Stock Exchange
While India’s NSE and BSE reported that they had not been impacted by the outage, the London Stock Exchange said that it was experiencing technical glitches. It announced the impact via its website, saying, “RNS news service is currently experiencing a third party global technical issue, preventing news from being published. Technical teams are working to restore t service, there is no impact to securities trading or other services on the London Stock Exchange.”
Media houses
Britain’s Sky News went off air on Friday. “Sky News have not been able to broadcast live TV this morning, currently telling viewers that we apologise for the interruption,” its executive chairman David Rhodes said on X. Sky News is one of the UK’s major television news channels.
911 service
In the US emergency services like 911 were affected in several states.
Healthcare
The Daily Mail reported that hospitals under the National Health Service in the UK have been affected. Doctors were unable to write prescriptions because they could not access patient records, and other healthcare providers could not make hospital or doctor appointments.
According to Reuters, two hospitals in Germany had to cancel elective surgery procedures on Friday due to the server outage.