It all started yesterday at dawn. Microsoft’s 365 subscription services began to fall in the United States, followed by Canada, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand. This has resulted in users being unable to access the most common services, such as SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Intune, PowerBI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Defender, and Viva Engage.
And although it does not affect “average” users as much, TV channels, airports and banks around the world were knocked offline in a massive blackout that caused computers running Windows to suddenly shut down.
According to Downdetector, a “vademecum” of sites and applications that do not work correctly on the web, Microsoft has been experiencing problems in various of its own applications for at least 6 hours. This has caused many companies cannot access their information. Aena, for example, has already announced delays in the more than 7,000 operations it had scheduled for today, and banks and gas stations, such as Repsol, are also reporting problems with access to the network.
Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity researcher, said in a post on X that “something super weird is going on right now” with people around the world complaining that their Windows computers were displaying a blue screen and entering recovery mode.
Something super weird happening right now: just been called by several totally different media outlets in the last few minutes, all with Windows machines suddenly BSoD’ing (Blue Screen of Death). Anyone else seen this? Seems to be entering recovery mode: pic.twitter.com/DxdLyA9BLA
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 19, 2024
The problem would have been caused by an update to Crowdstrike, an antivirus software from Microsoftwhich appeared to be causing computers to crash. Both the security firm and Microsoft say they are working on it to resolve it as soon as possible.