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Journalism of Courage
A big outage in Microsoft’s cloud services on Friday affected businesses worldwide, including airlines, banks, media companies, and healthcare. It was reported that many users in the Central US had problems with Azure services and Microsoft 365 apps. The issues were mostly about service management failures and problems with connectivity or availability.
As the world paused, social media buzzed with stories of the Microsoft outage. One post on X went viral when Akshay Kothari shared a photo of his Indigo boarding pass for a Hyderabad to Kolkata flight. With the usual printed details handwritten, it captured the essence of a day disrupted by the technology glitch.
“The Microsoft / CrowdStrike outage has taken down most airports in India. I got my first hand-written boarding pass today,” read his caption.
Everything was handwritten, from the seat number to the boarding time, arrival time, destinations, and even the date. The post has garnered over 2.2 million views already.
Social media users flooded the post with numerous comments. One user wrote, “Sometimes, the old-school way is still the best way when technology lets us down.” Meanwhile, a second user said, “this is insane!!!.” A third user shared, “”wow back to pen paper”.
And a fourth user added, “A handwritten boarding pass sounds like a dream. Hopefully you don’t get a handwritten flight.” “damn. this is a nice souvenir tho,” mentioned a fifth user.
People worldwide couldn’t log onto their computers on Friday morning because Windows machines showed a “blue screen error.” The message said, “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’re just collecting some error info, and then we’ll restart for you”
The aviation industry bore the brunt of the outage, with airlines and airports from Europe to Asia to the Americas facing major disruptions. Flights were grounded across many countries, causing widespread chaos. In India, airlines like Indigo, Akasa Air, Air India Express, and Spicejet reported technical glitches affecting services such as ticket booking and web check-in.
According to Microsoft, the outage that blocked access to several Microsoft 365 apps was due to a ‘configuration change’. On Microsoft’s Service Health Status page, they explained that this change in part of their Azure backend has disrupted the connection between storage and compute resources, making many Microsoft 365 apps unusable.
