Global cyber outage: Microsoft users report 'blue screen of death'; flights cancelled

Global software giant Microsoft on Friday said that an outage in its online services has affected customers worldwide, including in India.

Microsoft Windows users reported facing 'Blue Screen of Death' errors with many users taking to social media platform X to report about the issue. Meanwhile, cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike told US outlet NBC that it suffered a major outage on Friday impacting businesses globally. The outage resulted from an issue with the latest update, the company said. CrowdStrike is now in the process of rolling back that update globally, it said.

As per reports, Windows users are seeing blue screen errors on their screen with their laptops or personal computers getting stuck on restart loop. Major US carriers including Delta, United and American Airlines, have grounded all flights, regardless of destination, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Berlin Airport announced the suspension of all flights. Bloomberg said that London Stock Exchange was reporting "technical glitches." In India, SpiceJet announced via X (formerly Twitter) that it was experiencing technical challenges with its service provider, which affected online services like booking, check-in, and managing bookings.

IndiGo tweeted, "Our systems are currently impacted by a Microsoft outage, which is also affecting other companies. During this time booking, check-in, access to your boarding pass, and some flights may be impacted." As per a heatmap of India, put out by Downdetector, which detects outages, users in various parts of India reported problems.

The National Cyber Security Coordinator of Australia in a post on X saying that, "I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon. Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies."

The Redmond, Washington DC headquartered American multinational corporation on Friday said that it was investigating an issue preventing users from accessing its apps and services. On its support website, Microsoft said that "impacted services may include but are not limited to" Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365 admin centre among others.

"We're investigating an issue affecting access to multiple Microsoft 365 services. We're working to identify the full impact and will provide more information shortly," the official.

Low-cost US carriers Frontier Airlines, Allegiant and SunCountry also reported that their operations had been impacted. "The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue," Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN.

"Due to a global outage at a third party vendor, our booking, check-in, and trip-managing capabilities are temporarily unavailable," SunCountry said on its site as reported by CNN.

The US media outlet said that Microsoft on its Azure cloud software status report site, said that around 6 pm ET, the service went down for some customers in the Central US region - "including failures with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services."

"Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions. More details can be found within the admin center under MO821132 and http://status.cloud.microsoft," Microsoft took to X to state as users faced issues impacting their ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.