IT outage affects service and business worldwide

Kathmandu, 17 July: Mass IT outages on Friday have caused chaos in airlines, banks, media and shops with their IT System Shut down affecting the service.

Several airlines have been grounded while bank, telecommunication and media have been affected following a major outage in Microsoft’s cloud services, reported international media.

The service outage is said to have prevented Microsoft 365 users from accessing several apps and services worldwide.

Major US airlines including Delta and United have grounded all their flights due to a communication issue while international airlines –Virgin Australia and Qantas- have faced disruption, said CNN.

Likewise, Spicejet, IndiGo, Air India, Vistara and Akasa Air in India have faced technical difficulties affecting booking, check-in, and flight updates. As a temporary measure, affected Indian airlines handed out hand-written boarding passes for flights, reported Indian Express.

The outage has also brought down some TV channels like UK’s Sky News, which went offline for around an hour before restoring services at 9 AM local time, BBC’s CBBC kids channel also suffered an outage and replaced the bird song with the message ‘Sorry! Something’s gone wrong’, it added.

Microsoft has announced that it has identified the cause behind the outage, and that a majority of services were recovered, the paper said, adding however, several customers are reportedly still facing issues with various Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, still down.

“Cyber security firm Crowdstrike has confirmed the cause of the worldwide outage was a result of their defective software update for its Microsoft Windows hosts”, said BBC. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed, it added, referring to the statement by Crowdstrike.