Global Microsoft Outage Disrupts Services Across the World,Cybersecurity Firm CrowdStrike Also Hit by Outage

On Friday, a major outage in Microsoft’s online services affected users globally, including in India. Many Microsoft Windows users reported encountering ‘Blue Screen of Death’ errors, leading to widespread frustration and numerous complaints on social media platform X.

In a related incident, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike reported a significant outage affecting businesses worldwide. According to NBC, CrowdStrike attributed the outage to an issue with their latest update and has begun rolling back the update to mitigate the impact.

Reports indicate that Windows users faced blue screen errors, causing laptops and personal computers to get stuck in a restart loop. This issue also disrupted major US carriers like Delta, United, and American Airlines, grounding all flights regardless of destination, as per the Federal Aviation Administration.

Berlin Airport suspended all flights, and the London Stock Exchange reported technical glitches, according to Bloomberg.

Impact in India

In India, SpiceJet announced on X that it was experiencing technical challenges with its service provider, affecting online services such as booking, check-in, and managing bookings. IndiGo also tweeted that their systems were impacted by the Microsoft outage, which was affecting booking, check-in, access to boarding passes, and some flights.

Downdetector, a platform that detects outages, showed a heatmap indicating problems reported by users across various parts of India.

The National Cyber Security Coordinator of Australia stated on X, “I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon. Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies.”

Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington DC, acknowledged the issue and stated that it was investigating problems preventing users from accessing its apps and services. According to their support website, impacted services included but were not limited to Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, Microsoft Fabric, and the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Airline Operations Disrupted

Several low-cost US carriers, including Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and SunCountry, also reported operational disruptions. Allegiant’s website was unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue, and SunCountry announced on its site that booking, check-in, and trip-managing capabilities were temporarily unavailable due to a global outage at a third-party vendor.

Microsoft Azure Status

Microsoft’s Azure cloud software status report site indicated that around 6 pm ET, the service went down for some customers in the Central US region. This included failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services. Microsoft stated on X that their services were seeing continuous improvements as they continued mitigation actions. More details were provided within the admin center under MO821132 and at status.cloud.microsoft.