Microsoft outage: Company says issue resolved; residual impact still affecting some apps and services

Computers running Microsoft Windows have been hit with a wave of "

blue screen of death

" errors, triggering one of the most widespread IT disruptions in recent memory. The culprit appears to be a faulty update to cybersecurity software from

CrowdStrike

. Industries from aviation to finance have been severely impacted. Airlines have faced significant delays and disruptions, while banks, retailers, and news organizations have also reported outages.

The travel sector, in particular, seems to be bearing the brunt of the problem.
Microsoft has not issued an update on the outage. In a post on its' Service Health Status' update page, Microsoft has said that the issue has been largely resolved and only

residual impact

remains. Though the page still says "Service Degradation" on top for Microsoft 365 suite of apps.

Microsoft on 'Current status'

"The underlying cause of the issue has been fixed and several Microsoft 365 apps and services have been restored to full functionality. Residual impact is still affecting some Microsoft 365 apps and services, and Microsoft 365 engineers are continuing to conduct additional mitigation actions to provide relief. We're continuing to observe an increase in functionality and availability for the remaining impacted scenarios and we're monitoring this closely to ensure we're progressing towards full recovery. Microsoft is continuing to treat this event with the highest possible priority," read the company's statement.
As per the website, the issue started on Thursday, July 18, 2024, at 9:56 PM UTC

Preliminary root cause as per Microsoft

"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," says the company.