Microsoft Outage: Recent Update Caused Disruption, IT Ministry Issues Advisory For Users

Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, announced today that the government is in communication with Microsoft regarding the recent global outage that has impacted various sectors worldwide.

In a post on X, the Minister stated that the cause of the Microsoft outage has been "identified," and updates have been issued to address the problem.

He said that the National Informatics Centre's (NIC) ICT network, NICNET, remains unaffected.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) released a technical advisory, noting that "Windows hosts related to CrowdStrike agent 'Falcon Sensor' are facing outages and getting crashed due to a recent update received in the product."

The advisory detailed that affected Windows hosts are experiencing a "Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)" due to issues with the Falcon Sensor.

CERT also provided a workaround for the issue, advising users to boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment, navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory, locate and delete the file matching "C-00000291*.sys", and then boot the host normally.

The technical issues stemmed from the latest update of CrowdStrike, which has since been reverted by their team. However, services across various sectors were disrupted globally due to the combined technical problems at Microsoft and CrowdStrike, with millions of Microsoft Windows users encountering the "Blue Screen of Death" error, causing their systems to shut down or restart.

Microsoft attributed the issue to a "configuration change" in a segment of its Azure backend workloads, leading to connectivity failures between storage and compute resources, which in turn affected downstream Microsoft 365 services.

In a post on X, Microsoft stated, "Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions."

In India, several airlines reported system disruptions due to the Microsoft outage. Air India, Indigo, Akasa Air, and SpiceJet all experienced delays and issues with their digital systems. The users also faced difficulties accessing various Microsoft services, including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Azure.

The outage tracking website Downdetector also recorded complaints from users experiencing problems with other apps such as Instagram, Amazon, Gmail, and several major Indian banks, including the State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Bank of India, and HDFC Bank.