Ashwini Vaishnaw: In contact with Microsoft over global outage

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has said it was in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage.

“The reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Electronics and IT, and Railways said via X adding that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) is also issuing a technical advisory. The National Informatics Centre network is not affected,” he added.

• Read: Millions face disruption after outage hit Windows PC users globally

The CERT-In advisory said that the issues occurred in the latest update of CrowdStrike and the changes have been reverted by the Crowd Strike Team.

If hosts are still crashing and unable to stay online to receive the Channel File Changes, the CERT-In advised them a few steps to work around for this issue including – “Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment; Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drive\CrowdStrike directory; locating the file matching ‘C-00000291*.sys’, and delete it”; and then finally booting the host normally.

Earlier on Friday, Microsoft users globally, including in India, reported massive services outages. The , outage tracking website Downdetector showed users flagging disruptions across various services.

Globally, the Microsoft cloud outage led to US airlines cancelling flights, but the tech giant later reportedly said its Cloud services outage in the Central US region has been resolved. A new Crowdstrike (cybersecurity software firm) update is being cited as the cause of the outage, which has impacted Windows-based desktops and laptops.

Crowdstrike acknowledged the error and said, “Our engineers are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.” Further, they also mentioned that they will inform when the issue is resolved.

Microsoft also said it was investigating the issue, which has impacted users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

“We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state. We are aware of this issue and are currently investigating potential options Azure customers can take for mitigation,” the company said.

In India, several airports, hospitals, malls, and public offices suffered due to this outage, and several airlines have also cancelled their flights. For instance, Hyderabad airport cancelled as many as 23 flights—12 departures and 11 arrivals—including Indigo’s flights to Visakhapatnam, Tirupati, Ahmedabad, and Bengaluru.

IndiGo, SpiceJet and Akasa saw disruptions in their online check-in and boarding processes across their networks, forcing them to switch to manual mode.

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