Global IT Outage – Microsoft’s Disaster

I don’t often write on current events, but this one is huge. There is currently a global IT outage being felt across the globe.

The culprit? Microsoft and possible Crowdstrike.

Starting on the morning of Friday 19th July – employees found they were unable to login to their computers. Whilst this would already be a huge issue, we’ve also seen non-user Windows systems crashing. This is extra bad as these often run critical applications.

Australia was the first to alert the world to the problems, with retailers raising alarms. Sydney airport said “a global technical outage” has affected its operations, causing many flights to be: missed; delayed or cancelled.

Once Europe began to wake up, we too found alerts from airports warning of possible disruption.

USA has been seen taking extra precautions, as the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had been asked by Delta, United and American Airlines to ground all flights due to take off.

This isn’t just for end users either, this is also affecting large parts of Microsoft Azure in the US along with some Microsoft 365 functionality being lost.

Microsoft has confirmed that it’s currently tackling the problem as “The highest priority and urgency.”

In the UK, Sky News has also been unable to run some morning broadcasting due to the outage.

Coming back to Crowdstrike, this is a cyber security company that has not minced it’s words over the long history of security issues faced by the Windows operating systems. Demand for this tool has been “incredible” over the last year as told by Adam Meyers.

We can only hope that Microsoft fix the root cause and we’re back to 100% functionality ASAP.

Thanks for reading! Enjoy! 🎉