Airports throughout India are affected by Microsoft Windows Outage

Following a worldwide Microsoft outage, several airports around the country had a significant technical issue on Friday that affected the check-in processes for airlines including IndiGo, Akasa Air, SpiceJet, Air India, Vistara, and others.

The incident resulted in numerous domestic and international flight delays and cancellations. About 200 flights were cancelled by IndiGo Airlines alone. Additionally, customers are receiving handwritten boarding tickets from airlines.

The services began to come back online by evening after hours of downtown. Apart from the aviation industry, stock exchanges, banks, hospitals and other sectors across the globe faced trouble and experienced the risks of a shift towards digital, interconnected technologies.   

The IT outage affected equity investors in India and played part in nearly a Rs 8 trillion market capitalisation wipe-out, as per analysts. Though for National Stock Exchange and BSE it was a usual business day but global exchanges like the London Stock Exchange and Singapore Exchange faced disruption.

In India, many Windows users faced a “blue screen of death” error while booting up their machines because of the issue. The issues coincided with disruptions of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and 365 office software services.

A security service firm said that in India, the impact was limited to enterprises that were using the services of Crowdstrike.  

The financial and payments systems of India were largely unaffected though as per the Reserve Bank of India about 10 banks and NBFCs faced minor disruptions which have either been resolved or are being fixed.

A Microsoft spokesperson said, “Earlier today, a Crowdstrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally. We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”

In a post on X late in the evening, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote, "We are working closely with Crowdstrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online."

With the buzz on this being a cyberattack getting stronger, Crowdstrike’s global CEO, George Kurtz, in an X post said, “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.” He stressed: “This is not a security incident or cyberattack.”

It was later reported that a bug update caused by CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor led to malfunction and conflict with the Windows system.