A major Microsoft technical outage on Friday disrupted banking, media operations and global flight services across the world, including in India. The tech giant said its outage started at about 6 pm ET (IST 3:30 am) on Thursday with customers experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 apps and Azure service.
This led to the cancellation of several flights in the Central U.S. region and banks. The cause, exact nature and scale of the outage was unclear, though a new Crowdstrike (cybersecurity software firm) update is being cited as the cause of the outage, which has impacted Windows-based desktop and laptops.
Though Microsoft said the issue was fixed early Friday, but companies across the U.S. and Europe were still reporting problems. The company clarified "a small subset of services is still experiencing residual impact."
In India, Akasa Air, IndiGo and SpiceJet reported issues with booking and check-in following which several airlines, grounded planes and disrupted flight operations at Delhi and Mumbai airports.
While Akasa Airlines cited "infrastructure issues with our service provider" for the temporary unavailability of online services, including booking, check-in, SpiceJet announced activating manual check-in and boarding processes across airports. It also requested passengers with upcoming travel plans to arrive at the airport earlier than usual. IndiGo too warned that systems were currently impacted by a Microsoft outage.
In the US, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air ordered ground stops. Spain too reported a "computer incident" at all its airports. Ryanair, Europe's largest carrier, also warned passengers of potential disruptions which it said would affect all airlines.
Amsterdam's Schiphol and Belgium's Brussels airports were also hit by the outage. "It concerns a malfunction of the Microsoft Azure system, which many airlines use to check in baggage," Brussels Airport told Belgian broadcaster VRT.
Though there were concerns about the trading activities of several of the world's biggest banks, including JPMorgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs and Barclays, none of them have responded yet. However, one London-based trader said several multilateral trading facilities were being affected by the outage, leaving some clients unable to trade."We are having the mother of all global market outages," the trader told the news outlet.
In Australia, media, banks and telecoms companies reported that the outages hit their services.
Besides, train operators in the United Kingdom also reported issues. The glitch has affected news outlets including NBC News. Sky News reported it was unable to air live news.
Microsoft 365 posted on X 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 company did not respond to a request for comment. It did not explain the cause of the outage further.