IT ministry in touch with Microsoft on global outage; NIC not hit: Ashwini Vaishnaw

In a post on X, IT Minister Vaishnaw said that the reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue.

New Delhi: The Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) is in touch with Microsoft regarding global outage, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Friday.

"MEITY is continually in touch with Microsoft, which in turn is actively working with impacted entities.

In addition, CERT-In is coordinating with CISOs of critical infrastructure entities. All impacted entities are working to bring up their systems. In many cases, systems are partially up," the Minister posted on X.

The Minister said that the NIC (National Informatics Centre) network is not affected. The NIC under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is the technology partner of the Government of India. It manages all central government computer systems, it also provides technology-driven solutions to both the Centre and states.

The Minister also said that the reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue. CERT-In ( Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) has issued a technical advisory, he wrote.

Meanwhile, CERT-In has issued an advisory on the Microsoft outage caused by Crowdstrike update, and rated its severity as "critical".

"It has been reported that Windows hosts related to Crowdstrike agent 'Falcon Sensor' are facing outages and getting crashed due to recent update received in the product. The concerned windows hosts are experiencing a 'Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)' related to Falcon Sensor," CERT-In advisory said.

The CERT-In also suggested some workarounds too.

“If hosts are still crashing and unable to stay online to receive the channel file changes, the following steps can be used as work around for this issue: Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it. Boot the host normally. Also, users are advised to check the latest updates from the Crowd Strike portal,” the advisory said.