• Tech firm CrowdStrike says ‘Falcon Sensor’ software was causing Microsoft Win­dows to crash
• Banks, bourses and media houses in several countries ‘go offline’
• PTA says fault identified and fixed, only minimal impact seen in Pakistan

KARACHI: Travellers faced the prospect of sleeping overnight at the airport, or giving up and taking to the road for an arduous journey instead, as Friday’s worldwide IT breakdown caused chaos and left air passengers around the world “in limbo”.

Airlines, banks, rail services and other services were impa­cted worldwide as interruptions triggered by an outage of Microsoft’s cloud computing suites led to flights being grounded, news outlets being unable to broadcast information and operations in brokerage houses being hindered.

The outages were reported mainly in Australia, the US, the UK and India, among other countries, affecting institutions ranging from banks, media houses, and stock markets to government branches and airports.

According to Downdetector, a real-time internet outage monitoring website, breakdowns for Microsoft services, including the cloud computing program Azure and office software Microsoft 365, were reported globally since Thursday. In the US alone, 1,751 outages were reported.

Microsoft said its outage started at 3am on Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the central US region.

Separately, the company anno­unced it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services. “We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft said. “We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact.”

IT security firm Crowd­Strike ran a recorded phone message, saying it was aware of reports of crashes. “Thanks for contacting CrowdStrike support. CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows […] related to the Falcon sensor,” the prerecorded message played when Reuters called the company’s technical support.

According to the company, the Falcon Sensor software was causing Microsoft Win­dows to crash and display a blue screen, known informally as the ‘Blue Screen of Death’.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologised for a global tech failure, vowing to work with all of its customers as they work to get their operations back online.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our company,” he told NBC News ‘Today’ programme. “It could be some time for some systems that won’t automatically recover,” Kurtz said.

Flights not affected in Pakistan

According to Downdetector, in Pakistan a maximum of 25 outages of Microsoft Azure were reported, with only 13 outages of Microsoft 365. Haro­on Baloch, program manager at digital rights organisation Bytes for All, told Dawn.com, “I’ve not heard as of now if any Pakistani organisation or airline’s operations are disturbed due to Azure outage.”

However, the Pakistan Telecommunication Autho­rity (PTA) said the outage affected Microsoft customers in the country. “The fault forced affected PCs and servers into a recovery boot loop, preventing proper startup. Some internet services are also affected because of this,” it said.

The PTA added that the fault was identified and isolated with a fix provided by CrowdStrike. The PTA suggested clients to update the software from their support portal to restore services.

A Pakistan Internatio­nal Airlines spokesperson said the national carrier’s flight operations have been “fully restored and are operational”. He said, “As soon as the [glitch] was reported, the PIA switched to an alternative system of air operations.”

He added that one PIA flight at the Lahore airport was slightly delayed, but all other operations are fully normal.

Situation around globe

Major US carriers including American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines issued ground stops citing communication issues, less than an hour after Microsoft resolved the outage that impacted several low-cost carriers. UAL and Allegiant Air too grounded flights.

Australia’s Common­wealth Bank, said some customers had been unable to transfer money due to the service outage.

National airline Qantas and Sydney Airport said planes were delayed but still flying.

Victorian state police said some internal systems had been hit by the outage but emergency services were operating normally. The output of many media companies was also disrupted.

A spokesperson for New Zealand’s parliament said its computer systems had also been affected, while state broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a “major network outage”.

In a pre-recorded message played on Sky News Australia as regular programming was disrupted, correspondent Tom Connell said the outage was not believed to be the result of a hack.

“Our computers, our systems are down all the things that make Sky News run down and indeed for many other major companies around the country,” he said.

Three Indian airlines announced disruptions to their booking systems. “Our systems are currently impacted by a Microsoft outage,” IndiGo, the country’s largest airline by market share, said in a post on X. “During this time booking, check-in, access to your boarding pass, and some flights may be impacted.”

The Press Trust of India reported passengers were “stranded” in the coastal holiday hotspot of Goa as a result of a technical glitch with the airport’s check-in system.

The aviation sector was hit particularly hard due to its sensitivity to timings. Airlines rely on a closely coordinated schedule often run by air traffic control. Just one delay of a few minutes can throw off a flight schedule for take-offs and landings for an airport and airline for the rest of the day.

In Europe, Schiphol airport, Berlin airport, London Gatwick, Edin­bur­gh airport and others said they were also impacted by the outage.

However, some airlines and airports said they were already back online, with Spanish carrier Iberia saying it had managed to avoid flight cancellations.

At Dubai International, the world’s busiest international airport, check-ins for some flights were affected, but the airlines switched to an alternative system.

With input from Agencies and Mohammad Asghar in Rawalpindi

Published in Dawn, July 20th, 2024