Microsoft global outage disrupts aviation in India

Other services in the country largely unaffected

- 

A worldwide disruption in Microsoft's Windows and cloud services, following an update by American cybersecurity tech firm CrowdStrike, severely affected industries from travel to finance across the globe, including the operations of Indian aviation companies. In India and elsewhere, numerous flights were either delayed or cancelled leading to complete chaos.

IndiGo, India's largest airline, reported the cancellation of at least 192 flights over Friday and Saturday. Ground staff airports in the country were forced to issue handwritten boarding passes due to the outage.

By evening, services began to come back online after hours of downtime. From stock exchanges to banks and hospitals, various sectors globally experienced the risks of a shift towards digital, interconnected technologies.

Cascading effects of the IT outage spooked equity investors in India and played part in nearly a ₹8 trillion market capitalisation wipe-out, said analysts. Though National Stock Exchange and BSE issued statements that it was business as usual for them, global exchanges like the London Stock Exchange and Singapore Exchange witnessed disruptions.

In India, many Windows users faced a "blue screen of death" error while booting up their machines because of the issue. The issues coincided with disruptions of Microsoft's Azure cloud and 365 office software services.

The impact was, however, limited to enterprises in India that were using the services of CrowdStrike.

The Indian financial and payments systems remained largely unaffected, though the Reserve Bank of India said about 10 banks and NBFCs faced minor disruptions which have either been resolved or are being fixed.