Microsoft outage: How Indian banks, financial institutions averted global Windows glitch— RBI explains

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday, July 19, said only 10 banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) were affected by the global Microsoft Windows outage.

“Our assessment shows that only 10 banks and NBFCs had minor disruptions which have either been resolved or are being resolved,” the central bank said in a statement.

The large-scale outage in Microsoft Services occurred on July 19, impacting IT systems globally and disrupting various sectors. The RBI conducted an assessment to check the glitch's impact on its regulated entities.

The new CrowdStrike update in Windows 10 operating systems caused the blue screen flashing issue. Windows users were seeing blue screen errors on their screens, and their computers got stuck in a restart loop. Reports suggested that the scale of the outage was massive, spreading from airports to banks and even government offices.

The central bank said it had averted the global risk as its systems were not integrated with cloud-based services. Only a few banks were using the CrowdStrike tool, limiting the exposure of the disruption caused by the update.

“Critical systems of most banks are not in cloud and further, only a few banks are using the CrowdStrike tool,” the RBI said in the statement.

While the central bank's domain remains “insulated” from the global outage, it has issued an advisory to the banks to stay alert and take the necessary actions to operate in a resilient manner.

Shares of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity group, plunged 20 per cent in the early market session on Wall Street on Friday over allegations that it was involved in the outage that hit companies and airports around the world, according to an AFP report. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, the company's chief executive officer, George Kurtz, said it was deploying a fix and the outage was not a cyber attack.