Tech Desk
Jul 19, 2024
Microsoft cloud services on Friday were disrupted affected several businesses, including airlines, bank, supply chains, media groups and healthcare, across the world.
The Microsoft outage was reported when several users in the Central US region experienced issues with Azure services and its Microsoft 365 suite of apps which included failure with service management operations and connectivity or availability of services.
What caused the global tech outage?
Tech giant Microsoft announced that it has identified the cause behind the outage, and that a majority of services were recovered. However, several customers are reportedly still facing issues with various Microsoft 365 services, including Teams still down.
Based on what Microsoft has revealed, the outage which prevented users from accessing several Microsoft 365 apps was due to a ‘Configuration change’. According to Microsoft’s Service Health Status page, this configuration change in a section of their Azure backend workloads was causing interruption between storage and compute resources. This rendered several apps from Microsoft 365 apps unusable.
Another potential reason, as suggested by several news reports, is a cybersecurity company called Crowdstrike which produces anti-virus software. The reports claim that a software update from the company went wrong, and was blocking Windows devices, essentially prompting the “blue screen of death” on PCs.
According to a report by The Sydney Morning Herald, “The outage was caused by a fault in the “Falcon sensor” used by US-based cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike. The sensor is installed on many business computers to gather security data. The fault had a major impact on Microsoft systems worldwide.
“CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon sensor,” the company said in a statement.
