Microsoft Outage: Expect all flight issues to be resolved by noon, says Aviation Ministry

The Ministry of Civil Aviation on July 20 said that airline systems across airports have started working normally. The ministry also said that disruptions caused by the backlog will be cleared by noon today.

Murlidhar Mahol, the civil aviation minister also mentioned that airline systems across airports have been functioning normally since 3 am today.

“Since 3 AM, Airline systems across airports have started working normally. Flight operations are going smoothly now. There is a backlog because of disruptions yesterday, and it is getting cleared gradually. By noon today, we expect all issues to be resolved,” Ministry of Civil Aviation said, reported ANI.

Microsoft Outage: Flights disrupted since Friday

On Friday, several flights were reported to be delayed, re-scheduled and cancelled, after the global outage wreaked havoc. Delhi and Rajasthan Airports had to issue manual boarding passes amid the Microsoft issue which was apparently reported to be associated to an antivirus program update.

Services across industries including health, finance, and services in government agencies have been impacted worldwide. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said 10 banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) were affected by the global Microsoft Windows outage.

Meanwhile, bankers at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Nomura Holdings Inc. and Bank of America Corp. could not login, as employees across US federal agencies also faced a Windows error screen, reported Bloomberg.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) had also issued an advisory, alerting that the issue had been caused by Falcon Sensor, the latest update of the CrowdStrike agent.

Several systems crashed, flashing the "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD), affecting numerous Windows hosts equipped with the CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor. With stability issues at its centre, the update caused many systems to become inoperable.

In response, CrowdStrike reverted the changes made in the recent update. for hosts that still continue to experience crashes, CERT-In has outlined specific mitigation steps.