Indian airlines, airports and some brokerages affected by global IT outage
By Jayshree P Upadhyay and Jaspreet Kalra
MUMBAI (Reuters) -Several Indian airlines and airports and traders at some brokerages said they faced technical and operational disruptions on Friday amid a global IT outage.
India's minister for information technology in a post on X said the ministry was in touch with Microsoft and its associates regarding the global outage.
An update to a product offered by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike appeared to be the trigger, affecting customers using Microsoft's Windows Operating System. Microsoft said later on Friday the issue had been fixed.
"The reason for this outage has been identified and updates have been released to resolve the issue," India's minister for information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said.
"We are currently experiencing technical challenges with our service provider, affecting online services including booking, check-in, and manage booking functionalities," Indian airline SpiceJet said on social media platform X.
Indigo, Akasa Air, Vistara, Air India and Air India Express also posted messages on X saying they were facing issues.
New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai airports said they too faced some IT issues and some services were temporarily affected.
While India's brokerage firms faced technical issues, stock exchanges were not impacted. NSE and BSE said that their operations were running normally.
Among the brokerages in India, Nuvama Wealth Management, Edelweiss Mutual Fund, Motilal Oswal, IIFL Securities, 5Paisa Capital and Angel Broking are facing technical difficulties, traders at the brokerages told Reuters.
Edelweiss Mutual Fund posted on X that its systems were facing login issues which it was working to resolve. Nuvama in a statement to Reuters said it had seen a limited impact due to the global outage.
Other brokerage firms did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
India's interbank trading platforms were functioning, however, and banks said they were able to execute bonds and foreign exchange transactions without any issues.
Banking sources said that the major banks have not faced any technical issues.
A source at the country's central bank said they were aware of the global outage but their systems were functional.
Major U.S. airlines also issued ground stops citing communications issues while some other airlines, banks, media and hospitals around the world were also among those affected by the outage.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said on X that the company was "actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts" and that a fix was being deployed.
"This is not a security incident or cyberattack," Kurtz said in the post.
(Reporting by Jayshree P Upadhyay and Jaspreet Kalra; Writing by Swati Bhat; Editing by Tom Hogue and Susan Fenton)