Microsoft outage: Govt in touch with authorities, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) on Friday issued an advisory to Indian users on the Microsoft Windows outage that affected services globally.

The apex cybersecurity agency under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in its advisory attributed the outage to Microsoft’s CrowdStrike Agent Falcon Sensor update and suggested a few steps to resolve the issue.

Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw in a post on X said, “MeitY is in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage. The reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue. CERT is issuing a technical advisory. The National Informatics Centre (NIC) network is not affected.”

 

CERT-In has classified the severity rating of the outage as critical.

The agency describing the incident said, “It has been reported that Windows hosts related to CrowdStrike Agent Falcon Sensor are facing outages and crashing due to recent updates received in the product.”

Windows users faced a blue screen of death while booting up their machines because of the issue.

The CERT-In advisory suggested a manual workaround to fix the issue if it doesn’t get resolved for some users.

The agency advised users to boot Windows into safe mode or the Windows recovery environment, then navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory and delete the file matching the pattern C-00000291*.sys, and reboot the system normally.

It also recommended users check the latest updates from the CrowdStrike portal.

The worldwide Microsoft outage caused widespread disruptions in sectors ranging from flight operations and the stock market to media outlets and banking operations.

Early morning on Friday, the IT giant confirmed it was investigating an “issue” with its 365 apps and operating systems and was rerouting the impacted users to alternate systems.

“Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions,” said the company on X. “We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue.”