Microsoft reported that the outage began on Thursday at 6 p.m. ET, when multiple Azure services went down in the Central US regions.
Windows users worldwide were stuck with blue screens on Friday after being logged out of their systems following a massive outage. The widespread “cyber pandemic” resulting in a “Windows holiday” reportedly had a severe impact on several global institutions, as the stock market, banks, and airports suffered the IT hit. According to Microsoft, the outage began at about 6 pm ET on Thursday as some customers faced issued with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.
The American cybersecurity technology company also admitted to the issues arising due to its Falcon sensor. “CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.”
“Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket,” the company continued.
The cybersecurity company’s CEO, George Klutz, said, “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack.” He assured users that the Blue Screen of Death error (BSOD) followed after they found a defect “in a single content update for Windows hosts.”
Microsoft 365 also issued a statement on social media saying it was “investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services” and that the company was working to “reroute the affected traffic to healthy infrastructure.”
Areas and services impacted by Microsoft outage
DownDetector.com, a website that offers real-time problem and outage monitoring, displayed a heat map showing user-submitted problem reports concentrated over the past 24 hours. The Microsoft outage map reflected several US cities being affected by the issue. While Seattle and Boston were highlighted in yellow, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, areas around Tampa, and areas around New York took on a more vibrant orange shade. On the contrary, St Louis, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Houston took on a slight red shade. Meanwhile, Chicago, Washington and New York displayed significantly huge red marks.
The affected services in the country included:
- Major airlines such as American, Delta, and United Airlines grounded their flights due to communication difficulties. Frontier Airlines, Allegiant, and SunCountry also reported problems.
- The Associated Press, an American not-for-profit new agency set in New York City, reported “service disruption.”
- Cloud services – especially Azure
- Financial and banking institutions
- According to The Economic Times, Microsoft 365 admin centre, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Purview, PowerBI and Viva Engage were primarily hit.
