CrowdStrike, a US-based endpoint security provider to several global organisations including Microsoft, first released an update to its product – Falcon Sensor – on July 9 gradually rolling it out to companies globally over the next 10 days. On July 18 and 19, the update – intended to pre-emptively detect cybersecurity breaches – was pushed onto Microsoft devices unwittingly, triggering widespread chaos. It forced several banks, hospitals, airlines, and startups to resort to manual processes to continue operations, industry executives said.
“Around 300 flights have been cancelled, including around 200 for market leader Indigo alone till 6 pm (on Friday),” people aware of the details told ET.
In a statement, Indigo said the outage severely disrupted its operations by impacting key systems used for flight operations, passenger check-in, and baggage handling.
“Following rapid steps taken by IndiGo teams, to switch to manual/backup systems, operations at major Indian airports including Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore are now under control,” the airline said.
SpiceJet chairman Ajay Singh said the outage has been fully resolved and the airline’s systems are back to normal operations.
There are over 3,600 scheduled flights originating from Indian destinations, according to global aviation consulting firm Cirium.
India’s central bank was swift in reassuring that the country’s financial sector remains insulated from the global outage. An assessment carried out by the regulator showed that only 10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions which had been resolved or were being resolved, the Reserve Bank of India said in a statement on Friday evening.
“Critical systems of most banks are not in the cloud and further, only a few banks are using the CrowdStrike tool,” the RBI said.
While retail banking and financial operations remained unaffected, some banks faced issues while placing bids for Friday’s government bond auction worth Rs 31,000 crore, dealers said.
“Some banks faced issues during the auction due to the shutdowns, but the matter was resolved quickly and did not have a large impact,” said a senior treasury executive at a private bank.
Trading on both BSE and NSE remained normal but operations at a few brokerages such as Angel One, 5Paisa, IIFL Securities, Motilal Oswal, and Nuvama were temporarily impacted, market experts said.
Swinging into action, CrowdStrike said it was actively working with customers who were impacted by a defect found in a single content update for MS Windows hosts. Users of Apple Mac and Linux hosts were not impacted.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” George Kurtz, CrowdStrike CEO, said in a statement.
In a late evening post on X on Friday, Microsoft CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella said, “Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online.”
The outage, which started around 10 am IST, became visible when users of MS Windows were greeted by the so-called “blue screen of death” error message on booting their devices. The impact was quickly apparent across countries in Asia and SouthEast Asia with the western hemisphere still waking up.
A blue screen of death message is flashed on Windows devices when a critical issue forces the system to shut down or restart to prevent further damage.
Tesla chief Elon Musk responded to Nadella’s comments, saying the outage “gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain”.
As the tech glitch brought business to a standstill for the best part of the working day, it led to calls by enterprise users to lessen the dependence on only a handful of global technology providers.
As of 2022, Microsoft Azure had a 30% share in India’s overall cloud services market, which also counts the likes of AWS and Google Cloud as prominent players.
Microsoft’s products are used in many sectors of the Indian economy, including businesses, schools, and government organisations. “Outages are momentary with no deliberate intent to cause harm. Can happen occasionally to any company. But it represents an outcome that could also happen due to deliberate action by bad actors and intentions,” Bhavish Aggarwal, founder of Ola wrote on microblogging site X.
To prevent such occurrences, businesses must test their infrastructure and have multiple fail-safes in place as part of their cyber-resilience plan, Jake Moore, global security advisor at ESET, a cybersecurity agency said.
Air Travel Worst Hit
Airlines and airports faced one of the biggest disruptions leading to flight cancellations and thousands of passengers stranded at all major airports including in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Lucknow. Airlines – including IndiGo, Akasa Air India, Air India Express and SpiceJet – were scrambling to deal with the impact until late evening.
Minister of civil aviation Rammohan Naidu stated, “I have directed airport authorities and airlines to be compassionate and provide extra seating, water, and food for passengers affected by delays.”
The regional head of a global hospitality chain said that while the central reservation systems were impacted, occupancies went up – by around 30% through Friday – at some airport hotels due to flight cancellations and delays. “Hotels also operate on a property management system which is on site. That wasn’t impacted,” he added.
Also battling the disruption were top hospital chains like Max Healthcare. “Due to an outage of CrowdStrike around 10 am today (Friday), many of our software applications used for patient care and other processes were impacted. We had to switch to manual processes to service our patients as an alternative mechanism,” a spokesperson said.
