Hyderabad: A massive Microsoft outage has impacted airports, banks and businesses across the world. Millions of Microsoft Windows users around the world are currently experiencing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error, which causes their systems to suddenly shut down or restart. The outages are severe and appears to be global in nature, hitting millions of systems across the country. It seems to be related to US cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike, and its software called the Falcon Sensor.
What is CrowdStrike?
It is a US cybersecurity provider. Founded in 2011, CrowdStrike sells Falcon to big corporations and government clients, including major global banks, healthcare and energy companies, according to the company. The disruption appears to stem from an issue with cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, industry experts said.
Microsoft Windows is among its clients. One of the company’s main products is CrowdStrike Falcon, described on its website as a platform “providing real-time indicators of attack, hyper-accurate detection and automated protection” from possible cybersecurity threats.
A timeline of worst global IT outages between 2008-2023:
- Facebook( Now Meta) outage 2008: In 2008, Facebook was knocked offline by a bug that affected many of its 80 million users. That outage lasted for about a day.
- Dyn Cyberattack of 2016: This catastrophe impacted people across two continents, including the United States and Europe, as well as popular platforms like Airbnb, Amazon, BBC, CNN, eBay, Netflix, and Twitter. Multiple distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults attacked Dyn's Managed Domain Name System (DNS) service.
- British Airways fleet was grounded in May 2017: A massive computer system failure because of a power supply issue left 75,000 customers stranded. It disrupted the travel plans of thousands of passengers not only in the UK but all over the world who were intending to board a British Airways flight.
- Microsoft Azure cloud outage of 2018: Microsoft is one of the firms that offer Azure cloud servers as a platform for app development. However on June 20, 2018, the large cloud company's fortunes took a turn for the worse. In a nightmare scenario, a human error at one of Microsoft's data centres in Dublin, Ireland, resulted in an 11-hour outage.
- Facebook outage ( Now Meta) of March 13, 2019: Facebook and its services faced one of its worst outage on March 13, 2019, affecting 7.5 million people. People with Facebook services were disrupted for nearly a day and a half, according to Downdetector.
- Google services breakdown of December 2020: Google services breakdown resulted in a global outage of important services such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet, and others. All this when millions were working from home during the Covid pandemic. An examination eventually discovered that the problem was caused by a storage quota issue within the company.
- Fastly network outage in June 2021: Cloud service provider Fastly had its network go down in June 2021, taking down several sizeable global news websites, including the New York Times and CNN. It also impacted retailers like Target and Amazon, and several other organizations.
- Akamai outage of July 2021: A glitch with tech company Akamai prompted a global web outage affecting major institutions and airlines. According to the monitoring site Downdetector, many corporations' websites experienced online failures all across the world.
- Facebook outage of October 4, 2021: Facebook and its subsidiaries, including Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, disappeared from the internet and remained unavailable for roughly six hours. During the day of the outage, shares in the company dropped by nearly 5% and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's wealth fell by more than $6 billion. According to a report produced by Fortune and Snopes, Facebook lost at least $60 million in advertising revenue.
- AWS outage of December 2021: Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage in December 2021, lasting for several hours. The outage impacted operations for many leading businesses, including Netflix, Disney, Spotify, DoorDash, and Venmo. Amazon blamed the outage on an automation error causing multiple systems to act abnormally. The outage also prevented users from accessing some cloud services. This outage proved that the largest and safest cloud providers are also susceptible to downtime.
- Microsoft 365 outage of January 25, 2023: Over 240,000 Microsoft 365 users reported trouble accessing business and education tools during a major outage in January. A suite of Microsoft products were impacted, including Teams, Outlook, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Microsoft Graph.
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