DNA Explainer: How Microsoft-CrowdStrike IT outage affected airlines globally

A massive Microsoft outage caused widespread disruptions to computer systems worldwide. To a large extent, flight operations, banking services, financial services, and hospitals, among other key services, were disrupted globally. And India is not an exception.

In India, the services that were most disrupted were flight operations. Virtually all airline operators had to either cancel or reschedule the flights, causing inconvenience to millions of flyers.

Passengers at different airports have also shared their experiences on social media, posting images of handwritten boarding passes issued due to the disruption.  

American airlines requested for ground halt later that evening after reporting communication problems to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). As a result, the major airlines temporarily suspended operations globally.

'Blue screen of death' appeared on screens in airports all over the world, FIDS (Flight Information Display Systems) began to display it, and airline and airport operations came to a complete stop.

Global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike claimed it had discovered a technical flaw with their software and was trying to fix it, which was the root of the problem. Microsoft uses CrowdStrike's antiviral software on its Windows devices.

CrowdStrike, the security firm linked to a software update that caused the outage, said that the issue has been isolated and a fix deployed. George Kurtz, President and CEO of CrowdStrike said the cybersecurity company was working with customers on the issues faced by them while giving a reassurance that the issue was "not a security incident or cyberattack." At the time of filing this report, the outage is still in place in varying degrees, and the exact time by when it will be fully resolved is yet not stated by Microsoft.

 "Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally. We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery," Microsoft said in a statement.

Nearly all industries using Microsoft CrowdStrike, including emergency services, airports, hospitals, and parcel and express couriers, were impacted.

The faulty update affected not just the PCs but also the cloud storage arm of Microsoft, the 365 services platform, and the Azure platform.

Airlines and airports who use Microsoft Azure for their services faced the impact. This explains why certain airports were affected but not others. It is interesting to note that this outage did not affect the state-run Airports Authority of India airports; but, it did significantly affect the privately managed airports in Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, with the largest airport in the nation being in Delhi.

Similar to this, the majority of airlines that did not experience any disruption were those that heavily relied on Azure for everything from revenue management systems and departure control systems to hosting websites and booking engines. A small number of airlines continued to operate normally despite being affected by the airport outages.

Without functional systems, airlines had to manually issue boarding passes. For connecting travellers who required two boarding permits, this presented a further issue. Due to Azure's severe impact, software used by airports and airlines, such as the Departure Control Systems, experienced disruptions. There was a cost to the domino effect.

Notably, the outage affected companies across various sectors, from airlines, banks, food chains, and brokerage houses, to news organisations and railway networks. The travel industry was greatly affected, causing significant delays in flights across the world.

(with inputs from ANI)