Microsoft’s CrowdStrike leaves business black and blue in India

A massive global technology outage grounded hundreds of Indian flights on Friday, and temporarily halted operations at hospitals, banks, brokerages, factories and offices across the country as an erroneous update disrupted devices running Microsoft software, prominently used by enterprise networks worldwide.

CrowdStrike, a US-based endpoint security provider to several global organisations including Microsoft, first released an update to its product – Falcon Sensor – on July 9 gradually rolling it out to companies globally over the next 10 days. On July 18 and 19, the update – intended to pre-emptively detect cybersecurity breaches – was pushed onto Microsoft devices unwittingly, triggering widespread chaos. It forced several banks, hospitals, airlines, and startups to resort to manual processes to continue operations, industry executives said.