MICROSOFT OUTAGE
One of the world's major global systems outages has disrupted airline operations, stock markets activities, some media broadcast operations and payment gateways across time zones, on July 19. India's IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw posted on Social Media platform X that the the Ministry is in touch with Microsoft - at the centre of the disruption - regarding the global outage, and that government's servers under NIC have not been affected. A technical advisory has been issued by government's cyber agency CERT-In (Computer Emergency Response Team).
Millions of Windows users across the globe are experiencing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error which is causing the system to suddenly shut down or restart. Microsoft in a message said that the error is being caused due to a recent CrowdStrike update. Microsoft said its outage started with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region. Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services. Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Microsoft had earlier said that it is investigating the issue with its cloud service Azure that has impacted users ability to access various Microsoft 365 services. "We're continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact", a Microsoft statement said a short while ago.
The problem may be arising from an outage at American cyber security company Crowdstrike.