In one of the biggest-ever IT outages, an update of a product offered by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered problems with Microsoft's Windows across the planet, hitting operations at financial sector companies and airlines while hospital operations got postponed and some television channels went off air.
Most of the operations are running smoothly today, Union Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu assured that the pending issues caused by the outage on July 19 are expected to be resolved by noon.
Microsoft Global Outage | Top Points
Airline systems across airports, which were impacted due to a global IT outage on Friday, have started working normally, and all issues are likely to be resolved by noon on Saturday, Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu said.
The ministry said they are constantly monitoring the operations at airports and airlines to ensure travel readjustments and refunds are taken care of, he added.
There is a backlog because of disruptions on Friday, and it is getting cleared gradually, according to the statement. "By noon today, we expect all issues to be resolved," the minister said.
IndiGo, the largest airline by domestic market share, operating over 2,000 daily flights, had to cancel around 200 flights due to the Microsoft outage issue. An Indigo official told PTI, "However, customers may still experience delays and schedule disruptions over the weekend."
The two other carriers SpiceJet and Akasa Air said late Friday evening that all their systems at airports, including ticket bookings, were up and running.
The Indian financial and payments systems remained largely unaffected, though about 10 banks and NBFCs faced minor disruptions, which have either been resolved or are being fixed, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) -- the sector regulator -- said.
The outage was linked to a single update automatically rolled out to Crowdstrike Falcon, a ubiquitous cyber security tool used primarily by large organisations. This caused Microsoft Windows computers around the world to crash. CrowdStrike has since fixed the problem on their end.
According to AP, the modern IT infrastructure is highly interconnected and interdependent. If one component fails, it can lead to a situation where the failed component triggers a chain reaction that impacts other parts of the system.
In a report AP has said that in order to avoid a similar situation in future, companies should use a multi-cloud strategy and distribute their IT infrastructure across multiple cloud service providers. This way, if one provider goes down, the others can continue to support critical operations.
(With PTI and AP inputs)
