A Microsoft software outage rocked the world on July 19, affecting several sectors around the globe, disrupting travel and market operations among others.
The first glitches emerged in the United States late on Thursday, and were blamed on a failure of Microsoft services including Azure and 365. The LSE Group, which operates the London stock exchange, said it experienced a global technical issue preventing news from being published. Sky News was off air for some time too. In the United States, 911 services were disrupted and American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and others had to ground flights.
It was learnt later that CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor threat-monitoring software had sent an update, which led the Microsoft’s Windows operating system to crash. The subsequent disruption resulted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud services triggering a worldwide IT outage disrupting several businesses globally.
CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz issued an apology and said that it found that the system update that was sent had a software bug, which caused an issue with the Microsoft's operating system.
A quick look at which sectors were affected back home by the outage, and which skirted it:
Flight Operations: Check-in systems at airports across India, including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru airports were down causing commotion for passengers on July 19. Airlines, particularly IndiGo, Akasa and SpiceJet were affected due to glitch in check-in systems. Several domestic flights were delayed as airlines used alternate methods like Excel to check-in and manage booking services. They also carried out manual check-ins to ensure minimal disruption to schedules. At the Bengaluru airport, 53 domestic flights were cancelled and over 55 delayed.
Stock Market: While the stock exchanges remained unaffected by the global outage linked to Microsoft's technical issues, some trading platforms such as IIFL Securities, Angel One, and 5Paisa, flagged glitches. Traders at Edelweiss MF, Nuvama, and Motilal Oswal also faced tech outages.
Corporate: Since Microsoft Teams, Windows 365, OneDrive – all were down due to the tech outage, several Windows users across the globe and in India (especially those in IT services) thanked the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error, for causing their systems to glitch and granting them an “early weekend”. Memes flowed on social media consequently.
Banking Sector: According to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), only 10 banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) were affected by the outage. Critical systems of most banks in India are not on cloud and very few use CrowdStrike, which might have helped them avert any crisis.
Mutual Fund Industry: Major Indian asset management companies, including SBI MF, ICICI Prudential MF, Aditya Birla Sun Life MF, Axis MF, Zerodha MF, Nippon India MF and Bandhan MF were not hit by the global Microsoft outage.
Income Tax Department: The income tax department portal did not face any major disruptions and worked fine despite the Microsoft global outage, the department and chartered accountants said. “Today @IncomeTaxIndia portal response was good, 26AS AIS/TIS download was also pretty good,” a chartered accountant said.
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