A major outage in Microsoft’s cloud services on Friday (July 19) has hit businesses across the world, from airlines and financial services to media groups and healthcare. Here is what we know so far about the outage — and why it happened. World comes to a halt It was reported that on late Thursday several users in the Central US region experienced issues with Azure services and its Microsoft 365 suite of apps. The issues reported were mainly related to failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services. Workers around the world were also unable to log onto the computers on Friday morning with Windows machines displaying a “blue screen error”. “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’re just collecting some error info, and then we’ll restart for you,” the message read. The most visibly impacted by the outage was the aviation industry, with airlines and airports from Europe to Asia to the Americas seeing major disruption in services. Flights were grounded in many countries. #TravelUpdate: Due to infrastructure issues with our service provider, some of our online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable. Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence… — Akasa Air (@AkasaAir) July 19, 2024 In India, airlines such as Indigo, Akasa Air, Air India Express, and Spicejet announced that they were facing technical glitches impacting services like booking tickets and web check-in. Akasa Air, for instance, announced that its online services would be temporarily unavailable. “Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence request passengers with immediate travel plans to reach the airport early to check-in at our counters,” it posted on X. Apart from unleashing chaos at airports, many bank servers, as well as other businesses operating on Windows systems faced troubles. Notably, the London Stock Exchange was hit by the outage as well. In a statement, it said that an issue with the publication of news announcements was being investigated, although other systems, including the exchange itself, were running normally. What caused the outage Microsoft has announced that it has identified the cause behind the outage, and that a majority of services were recovered. However, several customers are reportedly still facing issues with various Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, still down. Based on what Microsoft has revealed, the outage which prevented users from accessing several Microsoft 365 apps was due to a ‘Configuration change’. According to Microsoft’s Service Health Status page, this configuration change in a section of their Azure backend workloads was causing interruption between storage and compute resources. This rendered several apps from Microsoft 365 apps unusable. Another potential reason, as suggested by several news reports, is a cybersecurity company called Crowdstrike which produces anti-virus software. The reports claim that a software update from the company went wrong, and was blocking Windows devices, essentially prompting the “blue screen of death” on PCs. According to a report by The Sydney Morning Herald, “The outage was caused by a fault in the “Falcon sensor” used by US-based cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike. The sensor is installed on many business computers to gather security data. The fault had a major impact on Microsoft systems worldwide. “CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon sensor,” the company said in a statement. What now After the outage, Microsoft said that it was working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate the outage’s impact in a more expedient fashion. Microsoft has now said on its Microsoft 365 Status handle on X that it was observing a positive trend in service availability due to this redirecting. Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress. More details can be found within the admin center under MO821132 and on — Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 19, 2024 Services are slowly coming back online. Hours after the outage, US-based Frontier Airlines said that their operations were resuming gradually. “The ground stop has been lifted, and our systems are gradually normalizing. We are in the process of resuming flight operations,” the airline posted on X.
