• By Mayukh Debnath
  • Fri, 19 Jul 2024 04:13 PM (IST)
  • Source:Reuters

Microsoft Outage: Several countries on Friday reported being hit by a worldwide outage of IT services. The outage affected public and private entities in several countries, on a large scale. Australia, the US, and the UK appeared particularly affected by the outage, with banks, airports, emergency services, media outlets, and other public service providers facing disruptions in their operations. The large-scale disruption appeared to stem from problems faced by Microsoft services across the world.

Australia IT Outage

In Australia, media houses, banks, and telecom companies appeared to relate to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, as per a statement by the country's home affairs ministry on Friday. A statement later in the day by Crowdstrike read, "Crowdstrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts... Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack... The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

Crowdsourced website Downdetector showed outages at several banks and telecoms companies in Australia. "I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon," the office of Australia's National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X. "Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies," the statement added.

"There is no information to suggest it is a cyber security incident. We continue to engage across key stakeholders." Her statement did not mention Crowdstrike. Australian state broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a "major network outage", without elaborating further.

Meanwhile, in a pre-recorded message played on Sky News Australia amid disruption in regular programming, correspondent Tom Connell said the outage was not believed to emanate from a hack. "Our computers, our systems are down, all the things that make Sky News run down and indeed for many other major companies around the country," he said.

Microsoft Outage: US Airlines Hit

Emergency services in at least one US state were affected by Friday's global IT outage. Alaska State Troopers, through a Facebook post, said a tech outage caused many 911 and non-emergency call centers to stop functioning "correctly".

Meanwhile, several major airlines in the country, including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, United Airlines and Allegiant Air, grounded flights less than an hour after Microsoft said it resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.

UK Outage: Stock Exchange, Media Affected

Platforms belonging to London Stock Exchange Group, the owner of the London Stock Exchange in UK, also suffered outage, market sources cited by Reuters said on Friday. Sky News, a leading British news channel remained affected by the outage for a number of hours before eventually returning on air.

However, its presenter said the channel was operating at minimal capacity and without many of its usual services. Two presenters were reading from paper scripts, with one, Anna Jones, saying they were not yet able to connect to any guests outside the studio to conduct interviews.

India IT Outage Effect: Airlines Suffer

In India, the operations of multiple airlines and reportedly some brokerage firms were affected by the outage. Budget carriers IndiGo and Spicejet issued advisories for their customers in light of the IT outage. "As systems are impacted globally due to ongoing issues with Microsoft Azure, we kindly request you to refrain from making multiple booking attempts during this time. We are working closely with Microsoft to resolve the issue and appreciate your patience," IndiGo said in an advisory on X.

Meanwhile, SpiceJet said, "We are currently experiencing technical challenges with our service provider, affecting online services including booking, check-in, and manage booking functionalities. As a result, we have activated manual check-in and boarding processes across airports. We kindly request passengers with upcoming travel plans to arrive at the airport earlier than usual to complete check-in at our counters. We sincerely regret for any inconvenience this may cause and assure you that our teams are diligently working with our service provider to resolve these issues promptly. Thank you for your patience and co-operation during this time."

(With inputs from Reuters)