Union Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw today said the government is “in touch” with the US tech giant Microsoft regarding the global outage that has affected multiple sectors across the world.
In a post on X, the Minister also said the reason for the Microsoft outage has been “identified” and updates have been released to resolve the issue.
“NIC network is not affected,” Mr Vaishnaw said, referring to the National Informatics Centre’s (NIC) Information and Communication Technology (ICT) network, NICNET, which is a pan-India communication network that provides services to the central and state governments.
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.
— Ashwini Vaishnaw (@AshwiniVaishnaw) July 19, 2024
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) issued a technical advisory and said it has been reported that “Windows hosts related to Crowd strike agent ‘Falcon Sensor’ are facing outages and getting crashed due to recent update received in the product.
“The concerned windows hosts are experiencing a ‘Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)’ related to Falcon Sensor,” the advisory added.
The issues occurred in the latest update of CrowdStrike and the changes have been reverted by their team, the CERT said.
It also said if hosts are still crashing and unable to stay online to receive the Channel File Changes, the following steps can be used as work around for this issue: Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment Navigate to the C:WindowsSystem32driversCrowdStrike directory Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.
“Boot the host normally,” it added.
Microsoft ‘Blue Screen Of Death’ Outage
Services across multiple sectors were affected worldwide today due to a technical problem at Microsoft and American cyber security company Crowdstrike.
Millions of Microsoft Windows users were experiencing the “Blue Screen of Death” error that caused their computers to shut down or restart.
Microsoft said the preliminary root cause was a “configuration change” in a portion of its Azure backend workloads. It caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections, the company said.
“Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions,” Microsoft said in a post on X.
Services Affected In India Due To Microsoft Outage
Several airlines in India reported that their systems across the network were impacted by the outage in Microsoft.
Air India said its “digital systems have been impacted temporarily due to the current Microsoft outage resulting in delays”.
Indigo, Akasa Air, and SpiceJet also reported similar disruptions.
The users were also unable to access various Microsoft apps and services. Microsoft 365, Microsoft Team, and Microsoft Azure were among the services that were affected.
According to the outage tracking website Downdetector, some users also complained that they were facing issues while using the following apps: Instagram, Amazon, Gmail, the State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Bank of India, and HDFC Bank.
