Windows PCs and Servers Shutting down globally have affected Microsoft IT systems at Airports, Banks and several business globally. Broadcasters are among the services that have been affected as well, causing mass chaos across the global network.

Airport services across various countries including India experienced long queues, inability to print boarding passes, flight scheduling, etc. The disruption was caused in the Microsoft Corp Cloud Services and as per news reports, CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity company is said to be the cause of the huge Windows outage which affected publishers, airlines, banks as well as telecom companies across the world. The business affected use CrowdStrike to manage the security on Windows PCs and servers. A recent update on the service code for Falcon Sensor, a software designed to prevent cyber attacks caused PCs to crash as per CrowdStrike. The company further said that it was not a cyber attack hence there was no need for panic. Dalal Street and London Stock Exchange were also affected by this downtime.

Udaipur Airport: Flight To and From Mumbai and Delhi were cancelled. Passengers at the airport were asked to return. 

In India, major airlines, viz. Indigo, SpiceJet, Akasa Airlines were forced to ground their planes and flight operations were disrupted. Regular passenger centric activities at Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Chennai airports were affected. The Airports have confirmed that things are back in order as far as the technical glitch was concerned and that the stake holders are working to minimise the inconvenience. INDIGO went as far as giving passengers hand written boarding passes. Airlines in India also used Whiteboards to update flight schedules for the convenience of passengers. Several other airports, including Manchester, Singapore, etc used novel manual ways to assist passengers.

The Indian Government issues advisories and updates after the IT Ministry has been in direct contact with Microsoft. CERT-In has called it a critical warning. The workaround given was as follows:

Boot Windows into Safe Mode or Windows Recovery Environment, Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrikeDirectory, find the file matching "C-00000291*.sys* and delete it and then Boot the host machine normally. Users were also advised to check the CrowdStrike Portal.