Millions of users across the globe were thrown into a digital blackout on Thursday as a series of outages crippled Microsoft services. From frustrated employees locked out of their office email to grounded flights at major airports, the disruption caused significant headaches.
The culprit behind the chaos wasn’t a malicious cyberattack, but rather a seemingly harmless software update. CrowdStrike, a popular cybersecurity company, released an update for its Falcon Sensor program that triggered a domino effect of outages. Here’s a closer look at the 10 crucial points that explain the Microsoft outage:
The Culprit: A faulty update for CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor, a security program for Windows machines, initiated the chaos. It all started from an update sent by CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity company. CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor is a security program used by companies to protect against hackers and online intruders. But when CrowdStrike’s new code reached computers that run Microsoft Windows software, the machines began to crash.
Blues of Blue Screen Of Death: The faulty update caused Windows machines to crash, displaying the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) error, rendering them unusable. BSOD also sometimes called as a stop error or a black screen error, is a critical error screen happening in Windows operating systems. It is cause due to a severe system crash where Windows can no longer function safely and is forced to shut down to prevent potential damage to your hardware.
Domino effect: BSODs on Windows machines triggered an unintended configuration change within Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Azure disrupted: Communication between storage and processing resources in Azure broke down, impacting various Microsoft services like Office 365.
Business disruptions: Businesses dependent on Microsoft 365 services like Teams and Power BI, faced operational disruptions.
Inconvenience is regretted: Check-in systems at airports worldwide were affected, grounding flights and causing delays for passengers. Airports became a scene of chaos with long queues of passengers. Flights saw delays and cancellations following the IT outage. Other critical services across the globe like banks, hospitals, and even stock market were also affected.
Cause identified: Both Microsoft and CrowdStrike have identified the faulty update and configuration change. CrowdStrike CEO apologised but at the same time warned that the fix could take some time.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” the company informed.
Microsoft’s statement: “We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state,” Microsoft wrote on its website.
No, it’s not a cyberattack: CrowdStrike assured that this is not a security incident or cyberattack which many feared. The outage is due to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” company wrote on its support page.
Outage fix: The outage has been resolved, and Microsoft services are back online.