NEW DELHI/MUMBAI/BENGALURU : AIRLINES, banks, media outlets, and financial institutions across the world were on Friday thrown into turmoil by one of the biggest IT crashes in recent histoy, caused by an update to an antivirus programme.
The mass IT outage came after some widely used Microsoft 365 applications and services shut down for hours as a result of the update. There were unprecedented chaos in major cities, including in India, with flights grounded, communication shut down, and shops closed.
Millions encountered the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error, causing sudden system shutdowns or restarts. Microsoft, which said it was actively working to fix the outage, attributed the BSOD issue to a recent update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which admitted that its action affected Windows devices.
In India, almost all the airlines and major airports were affected as they struggled to provide online booking, web check-ins, and flight status updates. IndiGo cancelled around 200 flights across the country.
SpiceJet, Air India, Akasa, and Vistara also faced disruptions due to a technical error in Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing platform that powers critical systems. Throughout the day, airlines were seen doing manual check-ins and issuing hand-written boarding passes.
Operations at key airports such as Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru were badly hit, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. Aviation minister Ram Mohan Naidu said his ministry and Airports Authority of India (AAI) are actively managing the situation.
Banking regulator RBI in a statement said that critical systems of most banks are not in cloud and that only a few banks are using the CrowdStrike tool, which created the chaos. “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,” an RBI statement read.
Auto major Maruti Suzuki India said it had briefly halted production and dispatch operations due to the outage.
Although many IT employees found it difficult to log into Microsoft applications on Friday, no major setbacks were reported for the IT industry except production downtime. “Those who were using Microsoft Azure were not able to log in,” an IT employee said.
Meanwhile, in a statement around 7 in the evening, CrowdStrike said that the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.
What exactly happened and how it created chaos
Microsoft said the issue began at 1900 GMT on Thursday, after a defective update to CrowdStrike Falcon, an IT solution designed to protect Windows systems, ended up crashing the systems instead
What is CrowdStrike that caused the chaos
CrowdStrike is a US-based cybersecurity firm that provides incident response and threat hunting services. It is known for its expertise in detecting and responding to advanced threats
Over 2,600 flights cancelled globally
Out of more than 1,10,000 scheduled commercial flights on Friday, 2,691 have been cancelled globally, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium