A faulty update knocked out several Windows computers and servers around the world on July 19, sending them through a boot loop featuring a so-called blue screen of death, disrupting aviation, banking, telecommunications, hospitals, TV channels and other companies around the world. The update was part of the Falcon endpoint threat detection and response product developed by CrowdStrike, an Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity firm.
Flights were briefly grounded in the United States, with airports reeling under a complete collapse of their digital systems around the world. In India, airlines started checking passengers in manually at airports serving Bengaluru, Chennai, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai, among others, issuing handwritten boarding passes as blue error screens took over flight information display boards. Many flights were delayed for hours or cancelled, with IndiGo alone reporting that it had cancelled at least 283 trips on Friday and Saturday due to the outage.
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Other airlines such as Akasa Air, SpiceJet, Vistara, Air India and Air India Express did not provide details of their flight cancellations. Bangalore International Airport Ltd said in a statement that airports were facing issues due to downtime affecting a departure control system developed by the firm Navitaire. Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu urged airlines to accommodate affected passengers with food and water during the delays.
The Union government’s eOffice suite for processing files and paperwork was also impacted for two hours, according to a source. Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said the National Informatics Centre was not impacted.
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Four-step recovery process
While Crowdstrike has withdrawn the faulty update and says it has issued a fix, network and IT administrators have had to manually execute a manual four-step recovery process to fix affected systems, as computers and servers need to boot completely to download the fixed software. The Indian Computer Emergency Team (CERT-in) under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology shared these steps in an advisory in the afternoon.
Mr. Vaishnaw said the government was “continuously” engaging with Microsoft, and that CERT-in was talking to chief information security officers at various critical infrastructure entities. “All impacted entities are working to bring up their systems,” Mr. Vaishnaw said. “In many cases, systems are partially up.” The government did not name the impacted entities.
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd said in a stock filing that “production/despatch operations were briefly halted” in the firm, but that they had fixed the bug internally.
The issues began globally at 3.30 a.m. and hit Indian airports and airlines when their respective systems received the faulty update. Airlines were able to implement the fix to some extent and restore digitised boarding procedures. However, airline executives warned that the disruption would “cascade” over subsequent days, due to planes reaching late for subsequent flights.
While the extent of disruptions in India was not entirely apparent on Friday evening, the Reserve Bank of India said that “only a few banks are using the CrowdStrike tool,” and that only 10 banks or non-banking financial institutions were impacted. “Overall, the Indian financial sector in the Reserve Bank’s domain remains insulated from the global outage,” the RBI said in a statement.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told a U.S. news channel that he was “deeply sorry” about the disruptions and said the firm would extend support to impacted customers. Microsoft said in a statement that it is “actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”
