Microsoft Corp’s cloud services caused service disruptions to a number of businesses Around the world, including in India. Microsoft Outage explained for UPSC WHAT LED TO THE PROBLEM? Microsoft said that a preliminary cause for the disruption was a configuration change “in a portion of [its] Azure backend workloads”, which resulted in connectivity failures that affected Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections. What is azure? Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. WHY CHANGES WERE BEING MADE? At the heart of the issue was a software update issued by US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike for Windows systems, which ended up malfunctioning and caused system downtimes. The issue was specific to Falcon, one of the company’s main software products, which is deeply embedded with the Windows operating system. WHY MANY CORPORATIONS WERE IMPACTED? Major corporations across the world use software developed by CrowdStrike, which is why all their systems faced the outage at the same time. WHAT IS FALCON? In cybersecurity parlance, Falcon is described as “endpoint detection and Response” (EDR) software. WHAT DOES FALCON DO? Its basic job is to monitor activity on computers on which it is installed, and constantly scan them for any potential threats such as malware. All major businesses around the world, including several Fortune 500 companies, are understood to use the service. HOW DOES FALCON WORK? To carry out its job, Falcon first gets access to deep details of a system. This includes, among other things, the communications that computers are sending over the internet, what programs they are running, and the files that are being opened. In that sense, Falcon is a ‘privileged software’ given its deep rooted integration at the operating system level.

WHICH SECTORS WERE THE MOST IMPACTED IN INDIA?

  • Aviation Sector: Several flights were delayed & even cancelled. Online Bookings were also impacted. The Ministry of Civil Aviation, in collaboration with the Airports Authority of India, implemented manual backup systems to maintain operational continuity. Extra staff was deployed to assist passengers, and address their concerns, the ministry said.
  • Banking Sector: In India, at least ten banks and NBFCs faced minor disruptions, which have either been resolved or are being resolved, the Reserve Bank of India said. It added that overall, the financial sector in India remained insulated from the global outage since critical systems of most banks were not in the cloud, and only a few banks are using the CrowdStrike tool.
  • Private users: A number of Windows PC-users were also greeted with the infamous ‘blue screen of death’, where their systems simply did not start up beyond a blue screen displaying an error message. According to Microsoft, a Windows device Displays blue screen errors if the operating system has encountered a serious problem that has forced it to shutdown or restart unexpectedly.
Goi’s RESPONSE Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was in touch with Microsoft, which in turn was working with impacted entities.
  • India’s nodal cyber agency, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) also issued an advisory regarding workarounds to the issue.
  • Cert-In was coordinating with chief information security officers of critical infrastructure entities.
National Informatics Centre’s (NIC’s) operations were not impacted.