Huge Microsoft Windows problems

Windows users around the world are reporting that their computers are showing the operating system’s Blue Screen of Death, with no apparent reason or way to prevent going into the error loop.

The issue has affected airports, television news stations, financial institutions, emergency services and many other industries and companies globally — including the London Stock Exchange.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange issued a notice on Friday morning notifying clients that the FTSE indices are not updating.

“Clients are advised that we are aware the FTSE issue globally and are awaiting resolution. Clients are advised to trade with caution,” it said.

Further reports indicate that Sky News in the UK, and ABC in Australia have been impacted, interrupting broadcasts or causing equipment like autocues to malfunction.

In South Africa, people are reporting that at least one major insurer has been affected.

Some have reported servers showing the dreaded error messages, while others report that all laptops in a company are bluescreening.

Initial reports indicated that a recent update from cybersecurity platform provider Crowdstrike might be the cause.

Feedback from Crowdstrike appears to confirm that a “content deployment” is responsible for the widespread problems Windows users are experiencing.

The company’s engineering team has issued a workaround for system administrators to recover affected systems.

Microsoft regional director and creator of breach notification service HaveIBeenPwned, Troy Hunt, tracked the issue around the world.

Users from Germany, India, Japan, and Indonesia sent him photos of PCs showing blue screens.

Reports of the mass blue screens come after Microsoft resolved a cloud services outage that grounded planes and disrupted flight operations in the US Thursday night.

Denver-based Frontier Airlines grounded flights for over two hours and attributed the cause to issues with Microsoft’s online services.

The airline lifted a nationwide pause on departures and started the process of resuming flights from 23:00 New York time (05:00 SAST).

Microsoft took until 07:00 SA time to resolve the problem, having assigned multiple teams to deal with it, according to its service status page.

Microsoft’s status pages showed its Azure cloud and Microsoft 365 services had problems for several hours.

It said the Azure issues were localised in the central US region.

One MyBroadband forum member reported that their US central region services in Azure were working as of 08:30 on Friday.

At the same time, some users also reported being unable to access Microsoft 365 cloud services.

Microsoft’s cloud status page confirms this, saying users may be unable to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

“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,” it said.

The company said impacted services may include but are not limited to: PowerBI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft Purview, and Viva Engage.

Microsoft said its internal telemetry and customer signals indicate that the following services are recovered: Defender, Defender for Endpoint, Intune, OneNote, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and Windows 365.

Capitec outage

Capitec also experienced a major outage on Friday morning.

The company has confirmed that it was impacted by the Crowdstrike incident. It said Crowdstrike is a key technology service provider.

“We recognise the inconvenience this has caused and wish to provide clarity and assurance to our valued clients,” a spokesperson told MyBroadband.

Since early this morning, Capitec clients faced difficulties accessing various banking services, including online banking, mobile app transactions, and card payments.

“However, we are pleased to report that card payments and ATM services have now been fully restored,” the bank said.

“Importantly, we want to reassure our clients that their bank accounts and personal data remain secure and unaffected by this incident.”

Capitec said its teams are working with Crowdstrike to ensure all services are restored to full functionality as quickly as possible.

“Client service remains our top priority, and we deeply regret the severe impact this disruption has had on your banking experience.”