Microsoft Windows BSOD Outage: A Global Tech outage
On July 19,2024 world saw one of the most significant IT outage in the recent times. Yes. we are talking about the Microsoft global outrage where millions of Windows PC users across the world, reported seeing 'Blue Screen of Death' on their devices, with many PCs going into a reboot loop.
Who are all affected by BSOD? Any device that uses Microsoft's Windows operating system is affected by this Blue Screen of death issue.
What caused this? Microsoft uses CrowdStrike's antivirus software ‘Falcon sensor’ in the Windows devices it sells. A latest version update to falcon software was floated by the company which was meant to make the clients' systems more secure against hacking, by updating the threats it defends against.
But a faulty code in the update files resulted in Blue screen of Death, a critical error screen displayed by Microsoft windows powered devices indicating system crash and cant be operated further as it goes into reboot loop.
The faulty update has also impacted Microsoft's cloud computing platform- Azure, its cloud storage and office 365 products.
Global Impact: This has caused widespread disruptions impacting critical services like flights, Banks, stock exchanges, health care and emergency services and also the media houses and corporates across the globe. Social media platforms like Instagram and e-bay are affected by this issue.
Impact in India
Indian banks remain insulated, confirms RBI.
RBI in its official press release on 19th July has stated that critical banking systems in India are predominantly not cloud-based, and only a few institutions utilize the CrowdStrike tool (10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions) and the limited exposure had helped in minimizing the impact to a handful of entities, which are also being resolved. RBI highlighted that Indian Financial sector in the RBI’s domain remain insulated from this global outage. RBI informed that has issued an advisory to all regulated entities to maintain vigilance and ensure operational resilience amidst potential disruptions.
SBI, HDFC and NCPI have confirmed that their operations are unaffected by the technical outage.
Indian Stock Exchanges: continued operations smoothly.
Information Technology Companies
National Stock Exchange (NSE) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), remain unaffected in contrast to major international exchanges, including the London Stock Exchange that experienced significant outages.
Union Minister for IT, Mr. Ashwini Vaishnaw addressing the global outage has informed in his official statement that MEITY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) is in touch with Microsoft and its associates, regarding the global outage. He added that the reason for this outage has been identified and updates
have been released to resolve the issue.
Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued a 'critical advisory' highlighting the issues faced and also has listed the steps to recover systems that are impacted.