KUALA LUMPUR – Microsoft is grappling with a significant outage that has impacted a wide range of industries, including banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters, and supermarkets, causing widespread global disruptions.
In the United States, major airlines such as American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines have been grounded. Meanwhile, airports in Germany and Spain have also reported issues.
Sky News in the UK is off-air due to the outages. The channel has been unable to broadcast live since this morning.
In Malaysia, regional airlines such as Scoot and transport facilities such as KLIA Ekspres were also reportedly experiencing disruptions.
PAYMENT SYSTEM UPDATE, 19 July 2024: Due to a technical glitch, tickets cannot be purchased via our app, website, or digital wallets at this time. Please proceed to the counter to buy your tickets.
— KLIA Ekspres (@KLIAekspres) July 19, 2024
AirAsia also experienced technical issues with all its check-in systems, including online and kiosk services.
X user @syahrulazlan91 said passengers scheduled to fly today were advised to arrive early at klia2.
The user said those who have not yet obtained their boarding passes or need to drop off luggage are required to queue at the check-in counters.
“The airline has urged travellers to allow extra time for these procedures due to the disruption.”
Microsoft Windows users across the globe reported experiencing Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors, with many individuals taking to social media platform X to report the issue.
Windows users said they encountered blue screen errors, causing their laptops and PCs to become stuck in a restart loop.
According to the latest update on Microsoft’s service status website, the company said: “We remain committed in treating this event with the highest priority and urgency while we continue to address the lingering impact for the remaining Microsoft 365 apps that are in a degraded state.”
When contacted, National Cyber Security Agency chief executive Megat Zuhairy Megat Tajuddin confirmed that the agency under the National Security Council is monitoring the issue.
However, he said the reported outage is “not a cyber attack” as it is instead related to computer threat checker CrowdStrike’s recent update causing Windows to crash and “bootloop”, a problem where computing devices are unable to complete regular booting sequences.
Meanwhile, according to CNBC, Microsoft announced the restoration of its cloud services after warning customers in the Central US region about potential issues with several Azure services and the Microsoft 365 suite, including problems with service management operations, connectivity, and service availability.
Microsoft reported that it had identified the root cause of the outage and had managed to restore the majority of affected services. Nevertheless, the company noted that some customers might still face issues.
The outage had affected various Microsoft 365 services, including Teams.
The outages among Windows 10 users were attributed to a new CrowdStrike update.
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc is an American cybersecurity technology company based in Austin, Texas. It provides penetration workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence and cyberattack services. – July 19, 2024