Last Friday either felt like a much-required technology detox, or your worst-case scenario suddenly became a reality. The (Microsoft) global IT outage had Windows operating computers show an error code and logged people out of their computers, creating a frenzy as many banks, stock markets and businesses came to a halt. Businesses had to work their way around without technology, serve their customers, and ease their anxieties and queries.
Aviation Industry, Supermarkets & Emergency Line - Hit the Worst
This global IT outage was especially hard for airlines and the aviation industry worldwide. Many flights were canceled and delayed as passengers were issued manual boarding passes, creating chaos at the airports. 911 emergency lines in the US also faced disruptions in many provinces. Supermarkets in the UK, and Australia also had to close down their services. Approximately 8.5 million computers around the world were affected by the crowdstrike shortage.
Stock Markets & Media Services Hit
The London Stock Market also reported disruptions, as opposed to the Indian Stock Market which didn't report any such incidents. Sky News, one of the prominent broadcasters in the UK went off air for some and ABC News 24 in Australia was unable to show news packages.
Reason for Outage
A recent crowdstrike update in Windows has been identified as a culprit behind the outage. Crowdstrike, a US-based cybersecurity provider recently issued an update to their ‘Falcon Sensor’ which is used in business computers to collect security data. The concerned Windows hosts were experiencing a ‘Blue Screen Of Death’ (BSOD) related to the Falcon sensor.
Microsoft’s Version
Microsoft reported that the root cause of the issue was the configuration change in the portion of our Azure backend workloads. This caused interruptions between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to his social media to report that he was working closely with the team at Crowdstrike to solve this issue and apologized for the inconvenience caused. The team at Microsoft is also assisting companies to troubleshoot the problem until the error is lifted.
The Consequences of Outage
The outage hurt the stock prices of Crowdstrike; a cybersecurity company (responsible for the outage) as the company’s stock plummeted more than 13% as the company reckons with the aftermath of the outage. And on the other hand, Microsoft’s stock plummeted as much as 11%.
The recent global IT outage has raised questions about our increased dependency on Technology and how it puts us in a vulnerable position, as only a select number of companies are in the game. The outage is also concerning from the point of view of data privacy and security, as the entity supposed to provide cybersecurity itself was caught up in service failure.
This event also puts things into perspective, as to how dependent we are on our technology and if it all stops working, it can cause utter chaos and disruptions as witnessed last week. After this event, one can't help but think, that maybe we need more cloud companies to reduce our dependence on the big 3 - Google, Microsoft & Amazon for web services.
(Author - Karishma is a content writer at TechDoQuest. She offers refreshing and youthful perspectives on whatever she writes about)