A widespread outage severely disrupted services for millions of people and businesses worldwide, prompting concerns about the risks associated with centralized control of technology in the hands of a few players. 

The outage, which crippled systems running on the Microsoft Windows platform, knocked several banks offline, grounded airlines, hit stock trading operations and pushed many media outlets off air across the globe, including India.  

Microsoft blamed a content update by its cybersecurity partner CrowdStrike for the global outage. George Kurtz, President & CEO CrowdStrike, admitted the error but ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack. “We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” Kurtz told NBC News.

In a LinkedIn post, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said, “Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”

In India, delays and disruption were the order of the day at airports forcing airlines to cancel many flights. IndiGo, for example, cancelled nearly 200 flights which is around 10 per cent of its daily movements. The outage impacted departure control systems at airports which manage check-in and baggage handling. Airlines resorted to a manual check-in process to keep the schedules running. The civil aviation ministry swung into action with minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu directing airlines and airports to provide extra seating, water and food for those impacted by delays. 

Banking services were also impacted with 10 banks and NBFCs reporting disruptions. The Reserve Bank of India issued an advisory asking banks to take necessary steps to ensure operational resilience and continuity. Several stock traders also faced operational disruption including brokerages such as 5paisa, IIFL Securities, and Angel One. BSE and NSE, however, did not face any disruptions.

There were some minor disruptions in the healthcare services as well. Fortis Healthcare said, “We experienced a brief interruption in our diagnostic services, which was managed efficiently. Our systems continue to run normally, and we have conducted thorough checks to verify this.” A Jaslok Hospital spokesperson said its application server for the Patient Engagement App, which is hosted on the cloud, was inaccessible. Several companies across the country were affected with many of their employees sharing images of their screens stuck with the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error, indicating that their system had crashed and unable to reboot. 

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

“CERT-In is coordinating with CISOs (Chief information security officers)of critical infrastructure entities. All impacted entities are working to bring up their systems. In many cases, systems are partially up,” Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Electronics and IT, and Railways said.

Globally, the impact of the outage was much more severe. In the US, all flights from several major US airlines – including Delta, United and American Airlines – were grounded Friday morning, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Several British railway companies announced that they were suspending operations. Government agencies were also affected with the Dutch and United Arab Emirates’ foreign ministries reporting some disruptions. In Australia, the impact was so severe that the government called a meeting of the National Emergency Mechanism group.

According to Siddharth Vishwanath, Advisory Markets Leader at PWC, there are only four to five end-point detection and response systems present in the market. CrowdStrike commands the largest market share at 70 per cent.  According to Vishwanath, 60-65 companies listed on BSE 100 will be using CrowdStrike to manage endpoint security on their Windows system. “This will give an idea on the scale of impact this would have had on India Inc and global businesses,” Vishwanath explained. 

Experts said the countless Windows systems affected by the outage will not merely come back online in an instant. “Users will have to boot up their systems manually, that in itself is likely to burden IT support personnel,” an expert said.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst at Greyhound Research, added that additional support and physical examination of the systems will be required to examine for malware or other bugs in the subsequent weeks after the outage is resolved. 

(With inputs from PT Jyothi Datta)

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