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Thursday evening, Microsoft 365 identified a global outage affecting users accessing various Microsoft 365 applications and services. Impacted users suffered from login issues, Azure hosted virtual machines not being available, and constant loading screens in Microsoft 365 services, just to name some of the issues.

Today marks a particularly challenging day for incident responders across the globe. As many of you may have noticed, a recent update from CrowdStrike has triggered widespread disruptions, causing chaos in various sectors. The ripple effects have been far-reaching and severe: While the technical specifics of the issue might not be the focus here—and indeed, there are experts better suited to dissect the cause—what's crucial is understanding the impact on those who manage such crises.

While individual blue screen errors are frustrating, the recent global system crashes caused by a CrowdStrike update incompatible with Microsoft Windows have wreaked havoc across entire industries since early Friday morning. Companies ranging from the airlines, media, and banking industries have been facing significant disruptions, with thousands of customer-facing devices experiencing blue screens and causing widespread travel delays and chaos.

Given recent global events, UptimeRobot is experiencing an increased number of downtime notifications. We are currently sending out five times more notifications than usual due to a widespread power outage impacting several critical services worldwide. Here’s a brief overview of the situation and how it affects our monitoring services.

On July 18, 2024 at 6:38 pm ET, Vantage DX, Martello’s Microsoft 365 and Teams performance management solution, started to see indicators of a likely Microsoft outage impacting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services. Almost an hour later at 7:41 pm ET Microsoft issued a statement on X.

In a recent unexpected turn of events, a faulty component in the latest CrowdStrike Falcon update led to widespread outages, crashing Windows systems globally. The repercussions were felt across various sectors, including airports, TV stations, hospitals, and even emergency services in the U.S. and Canada. The glitch, affecting both Windows workstations and servers, resulted in massive outages, bringing entire companies to a standstill and crashing fleets of hundreds of thousands of computers.

As we write, on Friday July 19th, a massive global cyber outage is continuing to take down critical services around the world dependent on Microsoft-based computers.

Today, the entire world is feeling the pain of a major software outage. While we know a lot about these occurrences—our entire business is built on helping companies manage incidents and outages effectively—we’re not here to share our opinion on it. Instead, we’d like to help those unfamiliar with the incident lifecycle understand what happens when an outage like this occurs, who is responsible for what, and what companies ultimately do to get things working again.

The recent global outage caused by an operating system update reminded me of how vulnerable we are today and most importantly, how close we are always teetering on global scale incidents with millions of interconnected dependencies. When the base of the house collapses, everything built on top is impacted. Those of us in IT Operations, Monitoring, Observability (insert the current acronym), etc., know firsthand this risk; we face it every day.