Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage. The downtime has impacted numerous businesses and institutions globally including in India. India’s nodal cyber agency, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) has also issued an advisory regarding workarounds to the issue. “MEITY is in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage. The reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue,” Vaishnaw said in a post on X. In an advisory, Cert-In said that Windows hosts related to the CrowdStrike agent ‘Falcon Sensor’ are facing outages and getting crashed due to recent updates received in the product. It suggested some workarounds too. “If hosts are still crashing and unable to stay online to receive the channel file changes, the following steps can be used as work around for this issue: Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it. Boot the host normally. Also, users are advised to check the latest updates from Crowd Strike portal.” An official Microsoft 365 service update on X earlier in the day said, “we're investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services". Reuters has cited sources saying the London Stock Exchange has suffered an outage. Microsoft's status pages indicated ongoing problems with Azure cloud and Microsoft 365 services, particularly in the central US region. "We are aware of this issue and have engaged multiple teams. We’ve determined the underlying cause," stated Microsoft. "We are currently applying mitigation. Customers should see signs of recovery at this time as mitigation applies across resources in the region." The Indian Express reported that India’s major airlines have been majorly hit due to the outage and have shifted to manual operations in the meantime. Some passengers were being issued handwritten boarding passes as well. Indigo said that its systems “across the network” were impacted by the issue with Microsoft Azure, “which has resulted in increased wait times at our contact centres and airports”. “You may experience slower check-ins and longer queues… Our digital team is also coordinating closely with Microsoft Azure to resolve these issues swiftly,” Indigo said in a statement. Akasa Air said that its online services like booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable. “Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence request passengers with immediate travel plans to reach the airport early to check-in at our counters,” it said in a post on social media platform X. Air India Express said the outage has impacted its airport operations as well across multiple airlines and airports globally. “Digital infrastructure issues have temporarily impacted online and airport operations across multiple airlines and airports globally. Please plan your travel and keep sufficient time in hand for airport procedures. We regret the inconvenience and appreciate your patience and understanding during this time,” it said on X. “We're currently facing a technical issue in providing updates on flight disruptions. Our team is actively working to resolve this issue. We regret any inconvenience caused and will update you once the issue is resolved. Thank you for your patience and cooperation,” Spicejet said.
