Blitz Bureau
A massive Microsoft outage unleashed havoc on computer systems across the world, grounding flights and crippling banks, stock exchanges, payment systems and emergency services, on July 19. Cyber-security platform CrowdStrike said a software update was behind the Windows crash.
Millions of Microsoft Windows users experienced ‘Blue Screen of Death’ (BSOD) error that caused their computers to shut down or restart. George Kurtz, President and CEO of CrowdStrike, stressed that this is not a security incident or cyberattack. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said later. Microsoft also said that the “underlying cause for a global outage has been fixed,” but the residual impact of cybersecurity outages are continuing to affect some Office 365 apps and services.
Transit systems hit
The Indian aviation sector was severely disrupted, with airports in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru among the worst hit.
In the UK, the outage caused disruption across healthcare, transport and banking sectors. GPs struggled to access their records systems, which included online bookings. Pharmacy services, such as access to prescriptions, were also affected. The disruption led to long queues at UK airports and brought some TV channels off air. Hundreds of thousands of people have had their foreign summer holidays thrown into jeopardy by the outage that caused chaos at British airports. Cabinet Office Minister Pat McFadden said the global outage was not a security attack or a hostile act. He said: “The cause appears to be a software error in an update … a fix is being put in place.”
US airlines impacted
Many US airlines, including American, United Airlines, and Delta Air Lines, issued ground stops for all their flights early on July 19 due to communication problems, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Public transit systems also reported temporary impacts, but for the most part, trains and buses were running as scheduled. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in Washington, DC, said its “website and some of our internal systems are currently down,” but trip-planning applications were later restored.
The White House said that President Joe Biden had been briefed on the outage and “his team is in touch with CrowdStrike and the impacted entities”. In the UAE, some online services by the Government were affected while Dubai International Airport (DXB) also confirmed that its operations were temporarily impacted. UAE’s flag carrier Etihad Airways and Dubai’s flagship carrier Emirates have warned passengers to expect minor delays.
