Jean-Luc Ichard
Update: Adds Crowdstrike platform glitch.
A major Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) outage led to the ‘blue screen of death’ on several Windows systems, while users worldwide were unable to access Microsoft 365 services.
This was caused by a glitch in an update of Crowdstrike’s (NASDAQ:CRWD) cybersecurity platform Falcon Sensor. Microsoft (MSFT) said it resolved the issue overnight.
“CrowdStrike (CRWD) is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor,” the company told CNBC, adding that it’s rolling back the update globally.
Microsoft (MSFT) also resolved a majority of its cloud services that were hit by the outage in the Central U.S. region, which began around 6 pm ET on Thursday. A small subset is still experiencing residual impact.
“A backend cluster management workflow deployed a configuration change causing backend access to be blocked between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources in the region,” Microsoft (MSFT) notified. “This resulted in the compute resources automatically restarting when connectivity was lost to virtual disks.”
Frontier Airlines, owned by Frontier Group (ULCC), canceled 149 flights on Thursday and delay 211 others because of the Azure outage, according to FlightAware.
“The ground stop has been lifted, and our systems are gradually normalizing. We are in the process of resuming flight operations,” Frontier updated at midnight.
“One of our information vendors is experiencing a global outage affecting multiple airlines,” Sun Country (SNCY) said, while Allegiant (ALGT) said its website was unavailable due to the Azure issue. Both airlines delayed and canceled flights on Thursday.
“We are monitoring technical issues at Frontier leading to cancellations and delays,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. “Our department will hold all airlines to their responsibilities to meet the needs of passengers.”
