Global IT Outage Ravages Banks, Media, Airlines Worldwide

Global businesses reported widespread system failures on the morning of Friday, July 19, in relation to issues with US tech giant Microsoft.

At present, there are speculations that a faulty update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that develops anti-virus software, is to blame for the outage as it clashed with Microsoft’s Windows, bricking devices worldwide.

In Ukraine, users of network operator Vodafone, as well as those of local banks Sense Bank and Monobank, all reported service disruption starting Friday morning.

Vodafone users reported the inability to make phone calls and topping up their balance. Sense Bank users reported a wide range of issues accessing the bank’s app, while Monobank users reported issues with fundraising functionalities, a common action in wartime Ukraine.

Mariia, a local in Kyiv, told Kyiv Post she encountered issues with Vodafone this morning where she was unable to make phone calls or top up her balance.

“I eventually got confirmation that the money got to my Vodafone balance, but I couldn’t renew my mobile subscription package,” she said.

Nova Poshta, Ukraine’s largest private postal service, also reported a “technical failure in the operation of the customer service system” in a Telegram announcement on Friday morning.

Outside Ukraine, airports in Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands, among other countries were also affected, where system outages have led to flight delays in and out of the airports, as reported by BBC.

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The outage is also affecting airlines worldwide and led to the suspension of flights for major US airlines such as United and Delta, it added.

Microsoft said Friday it was taking “mitigation actions” after service disruptions, as reported by AFP.

A service status update from Microsoft 365, its cloud-based productivity platform, said the preliminary root cause for its outage was “a configuration change” in its cloud offering Azure’s backend workloads, though it’s not clear if the technical issues with Microsoft 365 are related to the system outages experienced by businesses worldwide.

“A configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections,” it read.

The update said the issues started on Thursday, July 18, at 9:56 p.m. UTC, and that it is working on addressing the “residual impact” of the system failure.

However, American Airlines told BBC that a “technical issue with Crowdstrike that is impacting multiple carriers” is to blame.