A severe outage at Microsoft’s cloud service Azure on Friday, caused by an update from cyber security firm CrowdStrike, created havoc across a wide spectrum of industries globally as well as in India.
The outage led to companies shifting to manual processes and also cancelling services in some cases. Things seemed to be veering towards normal by the end of the day, but uncertainty abounded even as Microsoft tried to assuage nerves and the Indian government spelt out steps taken to fix the issue.
The outage caused numerous devices using the Windows operating systems to crash, with millions of users seeing the so-called ‘blue screen of death’ on their systems.
The outage lasted hours and disrupted ground transport systems, flights, banking operations, stock exchanges, brokerages, hospitals, auto companies and systems that were using Microsoft services, globally.
The outage also impacted media, payment systems in different parts of the world, including Australia and the UK, 911 services across several states in the US, and services at London Stock Exchange and Sky News, which went off air.
Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella said in a post on X, “Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”
India’s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, “The reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue,” adding that the country’s emergency response team Cert-in has also been roped in to handle the situation.
Meanwhile, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologised to customers and said the company is actively working to resolve the issue.
Flights Derailed in India
In India, the outage resulted in long queues at airports, flight delays and cancellations, causing inconvenience to passengers, and severely impacting critical systems used for flight operations, passenger check-in and baggage handling. Airlines shifted to manual or backup systems making it difficult for airline staff to ascertain passenger details and leading to delays across flights.
As per aviation analytics company Cirium, there were around 110,000 scheduled commercial flights globally on Friday, 19 July. As of 3:30 pm IST, 1,390 cancelled flights were cancelled and growing, Cirium said.
“For India, 3,652 flights scheduled originating from Indian destinations, with 56 cancellations so far. This does not include inbound flights to India,” Cirium said. A large number of flights, however, were delayed.
Airlines said they are prioritising operations to ensure flights take off with minimal delay. The civil aviation ministry said that it has implemented manual backup systems in collaboration with Airports Authority of India to maintain operational continuity.
The ministry also said that the terminal operations team is working closely with the airlines and the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) to ensure minimal disruption and inconvenience to passengers. Additionally, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is closely monitoring the situation with airlines to ensure all safety and procedural measures are in place.
From a manufacturing standpoint, India’s leading car maker Maruti Suzuki told exchanges that its production and dispatch operations had temporarily halted, but it took remedial and precautionary measures and was able to resume operations later in the day. No material impact is expected from the incident, it said.
Financial Services Impact
Meanwhile, banking regulator Reserve Bank of India said about 10 banks saw minor disruptions and have been asked to remain alert.
“Our assessment shows that only 10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions which have either been resolved or are being resolved. Overall, the Indian financial sector in the Reserve Bank’s domain remains insulated from the global outage. The Reserve Bank has issued an Advisory today to its Regulated Entities for taking necessary steps to remain alert and ensure operational resilience and continuity,” RBI said in a statement.
While stock markets were not impacted due to the outage, some brokerage houses were impacted.
“Due to a global outage…our systems are affected. Our team is working closely with both of them to restore our systems as soon as possible,” brokerage firm 5paisa said in a statement.
A dealer from a local brokerage house stated that only brokerages using Microsoft software were affected, and all brokerages using the cloud computing platform Azure would have experienced the issue. Analysts noted that brokerages were unable to access the data stored on the cloud drive.
Abhilash Pagaria, head of Nuvama Alternative and Quantitative Research, stated that the outage lasted two to three hours but was resolved thereafter. The glitch involved the system restarting repeatedly. However, he added that no trades were affected.
“NSE and NCL are working normal today,” spokesperson of the National Stock Exchange said.
Firms like Groww and Zerodha said they were not impacted.
Healthcare Impact
Services at hospitals like Max and Fortis were also disrupted with the outage impacting diagnostic and other patient services.
“Due to the outage, many of our software applications used for patient care and other processes were impacted,” a spokesperson from Max Healthcare said, adding that its hospitals had to switch to manual processes to service patients as an alternative mechanism.
“After implementing the recovery process provided by Crowdstrike, our systems have fully restored, and we have resumed regular operations,” the spokesperson added.
Another hospital chain, Fortis, said in a statement, “At Fortis, we experienced a brief interruption in our diagnostic services, which was managed efficiently. Our systems continue to run normally, and we have conducted thorough checks to verify this.”
(Press the bell 🔔 Icon, for all latest updates)
