Himalaya Harbinger, Rudrapur Bureau
A massive Microsoft outage unleashed havoc on computer systems across the world, grounding flights and crippling banks, stock exchanges, payment systems and emergency services. Microsoft, in a tweet approximately six hours after the outage was first reported, said that “Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress”.
The outage is possibly due to the failure of Crowdstrike Falcon, a cybersecurity platform that provides security solutions for Microsoft Windows. The disruptions continued hours after Microsoft said it was fixing the issue.
In India, the outage caused widespread disruptions in flight operations, payment systems, and trading, among other services. Flight delays were reported across airports, leading to long queues. The outage affected booking and check-in services for several airlines, including IndiGo, Akasa Airlines, and SpiceJet.
The central government, taking cognisance of the cyber outage, stated that it is in discussions with Microsoft to resolve the issue. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is likely to issue an advisory on the outage.
MAJOR AIRLINE DISRUPTIONS
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced that the outage made it “impossible” to handle flights. “KLM has also been affected by the global computer outage, making it impossible to handle flights. …We are working hard to resolve the problem. For now, we are forced to suspend most of the operation,” the airline said.
Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, one of Europe’s busiest hubs, was affected by the global outage. “The outage has an impact on flights flying from and to Schiphol,” a spokesperson said.
Berlin Airport halted all flights due to a technical fault. The airport operator said in a post on social media that check-ins were delayed due to the error.
In the US, several major airlines, including American Airlines, Delta, and United, reportedly grounded all flights.
Authorities in Spain reported a “computer incident” at all its airports, while Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned passengers of potential disruptions that would affect “all airlines operating across the Network”.
Flyers at Edinburgh Airport in Britain were unable to use automated boarding pass scanners, and monitors at security displayed a message saying “server offline.” Turkish Airlines was also experiencing problems with ticketing, check-in, and reservation processes due to a global technical issue in information systems.
STOCK EXCHANGES HIT
Operations of stock exchanges in various countries were disrupted by the outage. Services at the London Stock Exchange were affected. Several brokerage firms also faced technical outages, including Nuvama, Edelweiss, and Motilal Oswal. Traders reported disruptions in their operations in India.
NEWS BROADCASTERS DOWN
The outage also hit news services across the globe. Britain’s Sky News, one of the country’s major television news channels, said they were unable to broadcast. “Sky News have not been able to broadcast live TV this morning, currently telling viewers that we apologise for the interruption,” the broadcaster’s executive chairman David Rhodes said on X.
News agency Associated Press also faced service disruption in news delivery. “The Associated Press is currently experiencing an intermittent service disruption that may impact your view of available content,” an update received by India Today stated.
ABC News in Australia was also unable to broadcast news following the system failure.
Australia was one of the first countries to report the outage, where it affected banks, telecoms, media outlets and airlines. A “large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator said.
In the United States, emergency 911 services were disrupted in many parts of the United States, and non-emergency call centres were also not working due to the outage.
Health services are affected in many countries. A health booking system used by doctors in England has gone offline. Two hospitals in the northern German cities of Luebeck and Kiel have cancelled elective operations scheduled for today, news agency Reuters reported.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft stated that they are aware of the issue and working to resolve it. Microsoft said that multiple services are “continuing to see improvements in availability” as the company’s mitigation actions progress.
“We’re investigating an issue impacting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services. We’re continuing to reroute the affected traffic to healthy infrastructure,” the company said in a series of posts on X, which later said that they saw improvement in services.
