A cyber outage caused major panic across the world, as it affected IT systems in India, the US, Germany, the UK among other countries, disrupting airports, banks, media and telecom, and even 911 services.
Microsoft services such as Outlook, OneDrive and OneNote, Xbox App, Microsoft Teams, PowerBI and Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365Admin Centre, Microsoft Purview and Viva Engage were affected by the outage.
The cause
Microsoft said its outage started on Thursday, with customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services. Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services. A configuration change within the backend infrastructure of Azure may have caused the outage, a few media reports suggested.
On its Azure cloud software status report site, Microsoft said the service experienced "failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services.” While the cause, exact nature and scale of the outage was unclear, Microsoft appeared to suggest that the situation was improving. The company reportedly said it is taking "mitigation actions" to deal with "the lingering impact" of the outage.
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According to a BBC report, Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity company that builds software, issued a software update that went wrong, affecting Windows devices, and causing "blue screen of death" on PCs. Had it been a Windows issue, it would have been more widespread, a cyber correspondent of the news outlet noted.
Microsoft 365 said in a tweet that the company was working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion and that they were observing a positive trend in service availability.
The impact of the outage
Airports and airlines across the world, including India, Japan, Australia, the UK, and the UK have been impacted by the outage. Delays and flight cancellations have been reported in airports across the globe.
Booking and check-in services of IndiGo, Akasa Airlines and SpiceJet among others were affected in India. SpiceJet said due to "technical challenges" with its service provider, it activated manual check-in and boarding processes across airports, while Akasa Airlines due to "infrastructure issues with service provider" online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services have been temporarily suspended.
US airlines, including American Airlines, Delta and United Airlines reportedly cancelled flights. American Airlines has said that no flights are being allowed to take off.
Trading has been impacted in India, with brokerages Nuvama Wealth Management, Edelweiss Mutual Fund, Motilal Oswal, IIFL Securities, 5Paisa Capital and Angel Broking facing technical glitches.
Several major oil and gas trading desks in London and Singapore were struggling to execute trades due to a cyber outage, reported Reuters.
Media services too have been hit. Sky News in the UK went off air owing to the outage.