Microsoft faced a global outage on Friday (July 19). Many users were greeted with the ‘Blue screen of death’ (BSOD). The issue affected many Microsoft services, which includes Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, OneDrive, Outlook, Xbox App, and more. Microsoft finally acknowledged the outage after six hours of user-reported issues. They assured progress in restoring services.
However, in the meantime, the issue with Microsoft services caused havoc globally leading to grounded flights, halted operations at banks and stock exchanges, and disrupted payment systems and even emergency services.
Here’s how Microsoft outage affected various services globally and what all happened throughout the day.
How Microsoft outage effected airlines
Airlines across the globe, who were relying on Microsoft’s cloud service, reported disruption with check-ins, booking, refunds, and cancellations leading to flight cancellation, overcrowding, and chaos. As a workaround, many airlines were issuing manual boarding passes to their passengers. The outage caused significant disruptions at key Indian airports, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai. These critical transportation hubs faced crippled systems, impacting flight operations and passenger services.
Delhi Airport reported partial service disruptions and assured they were working to minimize inconvenience for travelers. However, the situation in Bengaluru was more severe, with reports suggesting 90 percent of flights departing from Terminal 1 were affected.
Impact of the Microsoft outage on financial services and banks
The issue also impacted stock markets around the world. LSEG Group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said its Workspace news and data platform suffered an outage. In addition to this, traders in oil, gas, power, stocks, currencies, and bonds from London to Singapore struggled to operate on Friday as the Microsoft outage hampered operations, companies, banks, and trading. Some trading activity also faced limitations. While exchange order books appear to be operational, execution software used by brokers seems to be encountering issues.
While the global Microsoft outage caused ripples across various sectors in India, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) found minimal impact on the financial system. Their assessment revealed only 10 banks and NBFCs experienced minor disruptions, which are either resolved or on the way to being resolved.
How health services were impacted due to Microsoft's global outage
The National Health Service hospitals in the UK were affected. Doctors couldn't write prescriptions because they couldn't access patient records, and other healthcare providers couldn't schedule hospital or doctor appointments. Reuters reported that two hospitals in Germany had to cancel elective surgery procedures on Friday due to the server outage.
Microsoft’s home country, the USA, reported disruption in its emergency services. The emergency 911 lines in the US state of Alaska were down. Furthermore, the issue also affected various broadcasters around the world, including Channel 10, Sky News, and ABC in Australia.
How the Government of India responded
Around 2 pm on Friday, Ashwini Vaishnaw in an X post said that the MEITY is in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage. He also informed that the NIC network is not affected by the issue and is working fine.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation was also coordinating with the management of airports and airlines across the country and the minister of civil aviation directed them to provide extra seating, water, and food for passengers affected by delays.
How Microsoft responded
Microsoft's Service Health Status informed that an issue with a configuration change within its Azure cloud platform was the culprit behind the outage. This change disrupted the connection between storage and computing resources, ultimately leading to connectivity failures for dependent Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft was working on a fix and in the meantime, it was redirecting the impacted traffic to healthy systems. At around 4 pm today, Microsoft announced that the underlying cause behind the global outage of its services has been fixed, however, residual impact continues on some Microsoft 365 apps and services. The company said they are taking additional measures to provide relief.
Indian cyber security agency CERT-In also issued an advisory where it informed that the issue occurred in the latest update of CrowdStrike and the changes have been reverted by the CrowdStrike Team.
Furthermore, the Government of India (Ministry of IT) is continually in touch with Microsoft, which in turn is actively working with impacted entities. In addition to this, the CERT-In is coordinating with CISOs of critical infrastructure entities. All impacted entities are working to bring up their systems. In many cases, systems are partially up.
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