Thousands of businesses across multiple geographies, spanning sectors such as aviation, banking and broadcasting, faced a severe service outage due to a faulty code update on their PCs, knocking down the usual flow of their work for several hours.

MANUAL CHECK-INS at airports leading to serpentine queues, handwritten boarding passes, delayed and cancelled flights, and the dead blue screen on Windows computers — a disruption in a major cybersecurity software tied to the Windows operating system and cloud service brought the world to a virtual halt on Friday.

Thousands of businesses across multiple geographies, spanning sectors such as aviation, banking and broadcasting, faced a severe service outage due to a faulty code update on their PCs, knocking down the usual flow of their work for several hours.

In India, the impact of the outage was most pronounced in the aviation sector, with hundreds of flights delayed and several cancelled as airline operators found their systems inoperational and had to switch to manual processes. At least ten banks and NBFCs had “minor disruptions”, which have either been resolved or are being resolved, the Reserve Bank of India said, adding that overall, India’s financial sector remained insulated from the global outage.

Major US carriers including Delta, United and American Airlines had flights grounded by authorities. Airlines in Europe and Asia-Pacific region also reported disruptions. A Reuters report said that operations at the London Stock Exchange were impacted as well.

The technical downtime seemed to partly emanate from a faulty software update issued by major US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The issue was specific to Falcon, one of the company’s main software products, which is deeply embedded with the Windows operating system. Major corporations across the world use software developed by CrowdStrike, which is why all their systems faced the outage at the same time.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said the defect was found in a “single content update” for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. He clarified that it was not a security incident or cyberattack. “We further recommend organisations ensure they’re communicating with CrowdStrike representatives through official channels,” he added.

Microsoft said that a preliminary cause of this disruption was a configuration change that was done “in a portion of our Azure backend workloads”, which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections. Azure is Microsoft’s Cloud computing platform.

India’s largest airliner Indigo and its peers Air India, SpiceJet and Akasa Air reported flight delays and cancellations, and several passengers were even issued hand-written boarding passes. At the Delhi Airport for instance, more than 400 flights faced delays and over 50 were cancelled, as per data compiled by flightradar24.

“I have directed airport authorities and airlines to be compassionate and provide extra seating, water and food for passengers affected by delays,” Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu said in a statement. The Ministry of Civil Aviation, in collaboration with AAI, implemented manual backup systems to maintain operational continuity. Extra staff was deployed to assist passengers and address their concerns, the ministry said.

Indigo said that its systems “across the network” were impacted by the issue with Microsoft Azure, “which has resulted in increased wait times at our contact centres and airports”. Akasa Air said its online services like booking, check-in and manage booking services would be temporarily unavailable. Air India Express said the outage has impacted its operations across airports globally.

EXPLAINEDFaulty software update
THE TECHNICAL downtime seemed to partly emanate from a faulty software update by US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The issue was specific to Falcon, one of its software products, embedded with Windows operating system.
Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was in touch with Microsoft, which in turn was working with impacted entities. India’s nodal cyber agency, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) also issued an advisory regarding workarounds to the issue.

Vaishnaw said Cert-In was coordinating with chief information security officers of critical infrastructure entities. “All impacted entities are working to bring up their systems. In many cases, systems are partially up,” Vaishnaw said. He clarified that the National Informatics Centre’s operations were not impacted by the outage.

The RBI said critical systems of most banks are not in the cloud, and only a few banks are using the CrowdStrike tool.

“HDFC Bank confirms that its systems are unaffected by the global outage. There is no impact on banking operations,” said Ramesh Lakshminarayan, CIO & Group Head – IT, HDFC Bank.

“BSE was not impacted due to the Microsoft issue. Our operations are running normal,” a spokesperson for the stock exchange said.