Widespread Microsoft Azure Outage Triggers Global Issues
The Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform suffered a significant outage, causing problems with technology servers that began on the night of July 18th in the United States.
What Caused the Outage?
The issue is attributed to a back-end cluster management workflow implemented by Microsoft Azure, which caused back-end access to be blocked between a subset of Azure Storage clusters and compute resources in the central region of the United States. This resulted in computing resources being automatically restarted when connectivity to virtual disks was lost.
Microsoft’s Response
Microsoft acknowledged the problem and deployed several teams to mitigate the failure. Most services have since been recovered, with only a few remaining subsets of services still experiencing residual impact.
What is CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike, a Microsoft service provider, also reported a failure caused by an update. According to the alert, the failure could cause "a blue screen or bug check error related to the Falcon sensor," a software designed to avoid cyber attacks in computer systems.
Impact on Global Operations
Although the issue started in the United States, it had a significant impact on global operations. Airports, airlines, media outlets, and banks in several countries, including Spain, reported failures. Specifically, companies such as Aena, Ryanair, Air Europa, Vueling, Iberia, Sky News, Europa Press, and Bizum communicated the outage.
Resolution
Microsoft identified and reverted the update that caused the problem, and the company shared a workaround for customers experiencing issues with its CrowdStrike service.