Global IT Outage: Full recovery from global Microsoft outage to take ‘weeks’| IN POINTS

Global IT Outage: Following an unprecedented IT failure that caused widespread disruption globally, experts predict that full recovery could take weeks. Although some services started to return online by Friday evening, the root cause of the outage remained unresolved.

Dubbed the "largest IT outage in history," the incident impacted airports, healthcare services, and businesses. Flights and hospital appointments were either canceled or handled manually due to a flawed software upgrade affecting Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Global IT Outage| IN POINTS 

• Microsoft outage brings essential services the world over to a standstill
• To a large extent, flight operations, banking services, financial services, and hospitals, among other key services, are disrupted globally due to an outage in Microsoft's cloud services. And India is not an exception.
• In India, three major airlines – IndiGo, SpiceJet, and Akasa Air – experienced technical problems affecting their booking, check-in, and flight update systems.

• The Reserve Bank of India has asserted that its assessment showed that only 10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions due to the Microsoft outage. The disruptions reported in those entities have "either been resolved or are being resolved"
• Media companies faced challenges as Britain's Sky News reported that the glitch disrupted its morning broadcasts, and Australia's ABC also experienced significant issues.
• The global impact of the software failure led some commentators to question the wisdom of depending on a single provider for diverse services.

• Microsoft announced that the root cause had been resolved and all affected services were now restored.
• CrowdStrike the security firm linked to a software update that caused the outage says that the issue has been isolated and a fix deployed.

CERT-In issues advisory

Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued an advisory, CIAD-2024-0035, addressing the severe outage impacting Microsoft Windows systems.

According to CERT, this disruption is linked to the recent update of the CrowdStrike agent, Falcon Sensor. CERT said that to mitigate these issues, the CrowdStrike team has reverted the changes made in the recent update. 

However, if hosts are still experiencing crashes and are unable to stay online to receive the necessary Channel File Changes, CERT-In recommends certain steps:

• First, boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
• Next, navigate to the directory C:WindowsSystem32driversCrowdStrike and locate the file matching the pattern "C-00000291*.sys".
• Once identified, delete the file. Finally, reboot the host normally.

Users are also advised to check for the latest updates and further instructions on the CrowdStrike support portal: CrowdStrike Support Portal.

The outage affected companies across various sectors, from airlines, banks, food chains and brokerage houses, to news organizations, and railway networks. The travel industry was greatly affected causing significant delays in flights across the world

- With inputs from agencies

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