Microsoft Outage: Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal Seeks 'Stringent Data Localisation Norms'

As businesses around the world reeled on Friday from a technical outage impacting computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, Ola Founder Bhavish Aggarwal pressed for stricter data localisation policies as 80% of India's data is stored outside.

"Govt (government) needs to recognise the risk of our data residing globally and bring more stringent data localisation norms and action to address these risks," he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

He also pointed out that outages are transient and unintentional; however, they could also result from deliberate actions by malicious actors.

The comment comes amid an outage in Microsoft's cloud services that disrupted operations across airlines, banks and major corporations globally. A technical malfunction originating from Microsoft's Azure backend impacted services from customer communications to financial transactions.

The outage was caused by a CrowdStrike update that affected Windows 11 users globally. Users could see a 'Blue Screen of Death' error, and it led the devices to restart. This disruption has extended to cloud services provided by AWS and Azure.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz later confirmed the outage was due to a single content update for Windows hosts and Mac and Linux users weren't impacted. "The issue has been identified and isolated and a fix has been deployed," Kurtz posted on X. He clarified that the issue wasn't a cyberattack or security incident.

Microsoft also later notified us that the underlying cause has been fixed; however, some Microsoft 365 apps and services will continue to see residual impact.

Due to the outage, shares of both companies fell on Friday. Shares of CrowdStrike Holdings were trading 9.42% lower at $310.72 on Nasdaq as of 9:52 a.m. However, shares of Microsoft Corporation were trading 0.29% lower at $439.10.