Global Microsoft Outage Affects Banks, Airlines, and Broadcasters

Wellington: On Friday, Microsoft users across the globe, including those in banking and airline industries, experienced extensive outages. This occurred just hours after Microsoft announced it was gradually resolving an issue affecting access to its Microsoft 365 applications and services. The specific cause, nature, and scale of the outage remain unclear.

Microsoft indicated via its posts on X that the situation was improving; however, escalating outages continued to be reported worldwide hours later. DownDetector, a website that tracks user-reported internet outages, recorded increasing disruptions in services at companies such as Visa, ADT Security, and Amazon, as well as airlines including American Airlines and Delta.

In Australia, news outlets reported disruptions affecting airlines, telecommunications providers, banks, and media broadcasters, who lost access to their computer systems. Some banks in New Zealand also reported being offline. Microsoft 365 posted on X that they were "working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion" and were "observing a positive trend in service availability."

The company did not respond to requests for further comments and did not provide additional details on the cause of the outage. In Australia, the affected services included banks like NAB, Commonwealth, and Bendigo; airlines such as Virgin Australia and Qantas; and internet and phone providers like Telstra. Australian news outlets, including ABC and Sky News, were unable to broadcast on their TV and radio channels and reported sudden shutdowns of Windows-based computers.

An X user shared a screenshot of an alert from Crowdstrike, indicating the company was aware of "reports of crashes on Windows hosts" related to its Falcon Sensor platform. The alert was posted on a password-protected Crowdstrike site and could not be independently verified. Crowdstrike did not respond to requests for comments.