Microsoft global outage: RBI clarifies only 10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions

Reserve Bank of India

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on July 19 clarified that only 10 banks and non-banking finance companies had minor disruptions due to large scale outage in Microsoft Services.

“Our assessment shows that only 10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions which have either been resolved or are being resolved,” RBI said in a release.

The central bank further said the Indian financial sector in its domain remains insulated from the global outage.

The RBI has issued an advisory on July 19 to its Regulated Entities for taking necessary steps to remain alert and ensure operational resilience and continuity, release said.

Earlier today, one of the world's major global systems outages has disrupted airline operations, stock markets activities, some media broadcast operations and payment gateways across time zones, on July 19.

India's IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw posted on Social Media platform X that the the Ministry is in touch with Microsoft - at the centre of the disruption - regarding the global outage, and that government's servers under NIC have not been affected. A technical advisory has been issued by government's cyber agency CERT-In (Computer Emergency Response Team).

Microsoft has said that the underlying cause behind the disruption in the Azure cloud service has been fixed, adding the issue with the Windows 365 personal computers was caused by a recent update to the CrowdStrike software.

CrowdStrike Holdings' chief executive officer too has posted on social media platform X that the company has identified the update which led to a worldwide crash in the Windows systems and that 'a fix has been deployed'.

“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” CEO George Kurtz added.