Microsoft faces global outage, multiple users affected

Airlines, banks, stock exchanges, payment systems, telecommunication and emergency services, health systems, and broadcasters were among those disrupted due to the outage

PGurus Newsdesk

July 19, 2024

Airlines, banks, stock exchanges, payment systems, telecommunication and emergency services, health systems, and broadcasters were among those disrupted due to the outage

Massive Microsoft outage hits flights, banks, stock exchanges, broadcasters

A massive cyber outage, including in Microsoft, hit systems across the world, including India, Australia, Germany, the United States, the UK, and other countries on Friday, affecting many critical services. Airlines, banks, stock exchanges, payment systems, telecommunication and emergency services, health systems, and broadcasters were among those disrupted due to the outage. Users from across the world reporting problems on their systems, the most common being the blue screen issue.

Users have reported sudden shutdown or restart of their systems which Microsoft said is due to a recent CrowdStrike update. As per Microsoft’s Service Health Status updates, the preliminary root cause is “a configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads (that has) caused interruption between storage and compute resources, and which (has) resulted in connectivity failures.” This has affected “downstream (and dependent) Microsoft 365 services”, the company said.

In a detailed thread on X, Microsoft said it is “investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services”. It added, “We’re working on rerouting impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion. We’re still observing a positive trend in service availability while we continue to redirect impacted traffic. We still expect users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue.”

We’re still observing a positive trend in service availability while we continue to redirect the impacted traffic. Additionaly info can be found in the admin center under MO821132 and https://t.co/Htn4qQEnsp
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 19, 2024

Services are still seeing “continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions“, the tech giant said.

Operations of several airliners were also affected across countries.

SpiceJet and Akasa Air in India are experiencing technical problems impacting flight bookings, check-in, and updates, according to reports. These issues appear to stem from a Microsoft cloud service outage.

The outage has caused significant disruptions for several airlines in the US too. Frontier Airlines has been forced to cancel 147 flights and delay 212 more. Sun Country and Allegiant have also reported delays, impacting 45 percent and 27 percent of their total flights, respectively.

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