Global Microsoft outage: Airline services affected in India, netizens say 'early weekend'

New Delhi, July 19
The ongoing global outage of the US tech giant Microsoft has affected millions of users across the world, including in India, where airlines and airport services are majorly hit.

Millions of Microsoft Windows users are experiencing the "Blue Screen of Death" error that causes their computers to shut down or restart.

The company said it is due to a recent update of American cyber security company Crowdstrike. It cited a "configuration change in a portion of its Azure backend workloads" as the primary reason.

The outage led to an interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections, the company noted.

In India, operations of major airlines like Indigo, Vistara, Akasa, Spicejet, and Air India ops, as well as airport services were affected, and the Bengaluru Airport issued an advisory for travellers. Delhi Airport services were also “temporarily impacted”.

"The Microsoft / CrowdStrike outage has taken down most airports in India. I got my first hand-written boarding pass today," a user wrote in a post on the social media platform X.com.

Globally, several airlines and banks were hit by the service disruptions.

The South China Morning Post reported that an IT breakdown has left the international airport in Hong Kong in "chaos".

Australian broadcasters like Channel 10, ABC, and Sky News Australia were down. The UK's London Stock Exchange reportedly suffered an outage, while in the US Alaska state, the emergency 911 lines have gone down.

Meanwhile, netizens celebrated the outage by sharing various humorous posts and memes on social media X.com and thanked the tech giant for an early weekend.

"Thank you @MicrosoftIndia for letting us feel an early weekend. Kudos," said a user.

"Thank you @MicrosoftIndia for Providing an unofficial holiday today...!" added another.

One user also "begged" Microsoft "to not fix the bluescreen for the next eight hours".

"Multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress," Microsoft 365 Status said in an X post.