"Blue Screen of Death": Global Microsoft Outage Causes Widespread Disruptions

Millions of users worldwide were affected on Friday, by a major outage of Microsoft's cloud services, including Azure and Office 365. The disruption had extensive consequences across sectors such as airlines, banks, and financial markets.

Cause of the Outage

As per reports, the outage has been linked to a faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike, resulting in affected PCs and servers entering a recovery boot loop and failing to start properly. CrowdStrike acknowledged the issue and identified the problematic update, although rectifying it posed challenges for cloud-based servers and remote Windows laptops. However, it remains unclear if all outages are linked to the CrowdStrike issue.

Airlines Grounded

U.S. carriers like American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines implemented ground stops due to communication issues, leading to widespread flight delays and cancellations. In India, airlines such as IndiGo and Akasa Airlines also reported disruptions, with Akasa noting temporary unavailability of online services.

Airlines responded swiftly by grounding flights and initiating efforts to resolve the issues. The Indian government's IT ministry issued an advisory acknowledging the cause of the outage and updates aimed at resolving the issue promptly.

Netizens React with Humor

As the outage unfolded, social media platforms witnessed a surge in humorous memes and comments. The hashtag #MicrosoftOutage trended widely, with users sharing jokes about unexpected "weekends" and posting images of the infamous "Blue Screen of Death."