Microsoft Outage: Former IT Minister Chandrasekhar Calls It 'Black Swan' Event

Former Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar expressed astonishment at the scale and impact of the Microsoft outage, describing it as unparalleled in his career spanning over three decades.

A widespread technical malfunction originating from Microsoft's Azure backend disrupted operations across airlines, banks, and major corporations globally, impacting services from customer communications to financial transactions.

"This is something I have never seen in my life before," Chandrashekhar told NDTV. "I've seen ups and downs in tech, but I've never seen anything this deep affecting every nation and every business."

Attributing the outage to a cybersecurity solution at the endpoint of the cloud, Chandrashekhar highlighted the complexity of the digital landscape.

"It is certainly a black swan event of a kind that I haven't seen or experienced before," he said. However, he reassured that Microsoft Inc., a stalwart in the tech industry, was actively addressing the issue.

The root cause was identified as an issue with the CrowdStrike cybersecurity agent, whose updates were incompatible with Windows systems, leading to widespread disruptions. This disruption extended to cloud services provided by AWS and Azure.

Chandrashekhar emphasised the severe impact on small businesses and consumers, resulting in significant financial losses and operational disruptions.

This incident underscores how vulnerable we are in our increasingly interconnected digital world, he said.