- In the early hours (IST) of 19th July reports emerged of a Microsoft Azure cloud service outage affecting users in the Central U.S. area.
- The outage quickly spread to several other countries, including India, disrupting flight operations and air traffic, and forcing airports to switch to manual operations.
- Brokerages and stock exchanges were also impacted, causing significant disruption.
- The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT-In, issued a “Critical” severity rating for the incident.
- Microsoft acknowledged the issue, noting that “Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, may encounter a bug check.”
- The impact happened when the update started rolling out.
- The glitch was triggered by a software update in CrowdStrike’s endpoint protection program, Falcon Sensor.
- CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, deploys a unified security program to stop breaches in real-time.
- The Falcon Sensor platform runs with high privileges to protect endpoints.
- A mishap in this platform can cause operating systems to crash, leading to the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and boot loop cycles, preventing access to devices linked to the Falcon platform.
- The outage had a broad impact, affecting Microsoft’s users globally, including airports, airlines, financial institutions, and office workers.
- CrowdStrike has since deployed a fix, and the situation is gradually returning to normal.
| Blue Screen of Death • Microsoft first introduced the blue screen of death, also known as BSOD, to users of Windows 3.0 in 1993. • To be technical for a moment, the blue screen of death is more formally known as a stop error. • A critical error that has caused the Windows operating system to crash. • The blue screen of death problem often indicates kernel-level conflicts or bugs, such bugs are particularly difficult to diagnose and fix because they operate at the deepest levels of the operating system, where detailed interactions with hardware occur. • However, these stop errors have also historically appeared due to problems with faulty memory or overheating issues, for example. • The colour of the blue screen of death to black for Windows 11 users in July 2021, although it reverted to the familiar blue by the end of that year. |
Dig Deeper: Read about the concept of Black Swan events.
