North News Service | Chandigarh, July 19
The critical services including Airlines, health systems, banks, telecommunication and emergency services were among those disrupted due to a major cyber outage hit several IT systems across the world, including India, Australia, Germany, the United States, the UK, and other countries on Friday. The outage is said to be apparently due to failure of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity platform that provides security solutions for Microsoft Windows, according to reports. In India, the outage caused widespread flight delays across airports. The outage hit booking and check-in services of several airlines, including IndiGo, Akasa Airlines and SpiceJet.
According to media reports, Microsoft 365 posted on X that the company was “working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion” and that they were “observing a positive trend in service availability.” The reports appeared also highlighted that a widespread Windows bug has put systems of thousands of users worldwide into ‘recovery’ mode, displaying a blue screen with the error message: “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly. If you’d like to restart and try again, choose Restart my PC below.” This issue, known as the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ bug, has affected various sectors including airports, government offices, media houses, businesses, and even emergency services.
“MEITY is 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. CERT is issuing a technical advisory. NIC network is not affected,” said Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in his post on X previously known as Twitter.
While commenting on the issue, Microsoft said that our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions.
The news outlet The Times of India reported that users on social media have been sharing screenshots of their PCs displaying the blue screen message. The bug appears to prevent Windows from loading correctly, causing significant disruptions. The severity of the issue has led to downtime in critical services and operations globally. Many organizations are working to address the problem and resume normal functionality. The cause of this widespread bug remains under investigation, and users are advised to follow prompts to restart their PCs in an attempt to resolve the issue.
The news outlet India Today reported that in Australia, the outage affected disrupted banks, telecoms, media outlets and airlines. A “large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator said. In addition to it, Emergency 911 services were disrupted in many parts of the United States, and non-emergency call centres were also not working due to the outage. Meanwhile, Britain’s Sky News, one of the country’s major television news channels, said they were unable to broadcast. “Sky News have not been able to broadcast live TV this morning, currently telling viewers that we apologise for the interruption,” the broadcaster’s executive chairman David Rhodes said on X.
News agency Associated Press also faced service disruption in news delivery. “The Associated Press is currently experiencing an intermittent service disruption that may impact your view of available content,” India Today further said.
