Microsoft global failure triggers incidents in the aviation, financial and healthcare sectors

The failure suffered in Microsoft systems following the update of a cybersecurity component of the company Crowdstrike has caused numerous incidents globally in airlines, airports, payment systems, health systems or media outlets, among others.

This update is causing technical issues for Microsoft customers, resulting in a blue screen of death that prevents the update from working properly.

Crowdstrike, a service provider for some of the world’s largest companies such as Microsoft and computer manufacturer Dell, is already applying mitigation and recovery measures to the affected systems and clients, managing to restore several of these systems. In parallel, it is working on a new update to replace the one that is causing problems.

It is not a security incident or a cyber attack

Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz has stressed on the social network X that what happened is not a security incident or a cyber attack, but an isolated problem for which a solution has already been implemented and for which support is being provided to customers so that they can obtain the latest updates.

According to computer experts who spoke to EFE, the latest update to Falcon drivers contained errors; it immediately crashed Azure, the cloud computing platform created by Microsoft to build, test, deploy and manage applications and services using its global infrastructure.

This led to the appearance of blue screens or “screens of death” that showed all over the world that the systems had stopped working, and that the servers had to be restarted.

According to Microsoft, this configuration change in a part of the workload of Azure servers (the cloud computing platform created by the technology company to manage applications and services) caused a storage and processing interruption that affected Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft services are already experiencing improvements

Microsoft has indicated that the underlying cause of the issue has been fixed and full functionality has been restored to several Microsoft 365 apps and services, but the residual impact continues to affect some apps and services.

The Microsoft 365 engineering team continues to take additional mitigation actions and is seeing an increase in functionality and availability as it continues to move toward a full recovery by addressing this issue “with the highest possible priority.”

The tech giant is working to redirect affected traffic to alternative systems to alleviate this impact in a more convenient way.

This disruption of software linked to Microsoft systems has caused problems in a number of sectors worldwide, with the aviation sector being one of the most affected.

In the case of Spain, Aena has been gradually recovering some of its systems and although all airports are operational, some processes are operating more slowly. Flights are being operated in collaboration with the airlines.

These problems have spread across half the world, with several major US airlines grounded and incidents affecting major airports and airlines in Europe and Asia.

Globally, problems have affected some of the major international media outlets, the Paris 2024 computer system on the eve of the games, the London Stock Exchange, as well as various railway companies.