Companies worldwide experienced interruptions amidst an outage of Microsoft’s cloud computing suites on Friday, with flights being grounded, news outlets unable to broadcast information, and operations in brokerage houses being hindered.
Outages have been reported in Australia, the US, the UK, and India, affecting institutions ranging from banks, media houses, and stock markets to government branches and airports.
According to DownDetector, a real-time internet outage monitoring website, breakdowns for Microsoft services including the cloud computing program Azure and office software Microsoft 365 were reported globally within the last 24 hours. In the US, 1,751 outages were reported.
Microsoft said that its outage started at about 6:00pm Eastern Time on Thursday, with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.
Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.
“We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft said on its website. “We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact.”
IT security firm Crowdstrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor.
“Thanks for contacting Crowdstrike support. Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows […] related to the Falcon sensor,” a prerecorded message played when a Reuters reporter called the company’s technical support.