After electronic blackout, airport travelers display handwritten boarding passes: 'Thank you, Microsoft'

A passenger shows a handwritten boarding pass on a flight in India on Friday, July 19 – Photo: Social Media

Akshay Kothari, who had a flight between Hyderabad and Kolkata, India, wrote: “Microsoft/CrowdStrike outage has shut down most airports in India. Got my first handwritten boarding pass today 😅.”

📴The issue will be linked to systems running Windows at CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity services provider. The incident also disrupted banking and communications services.

A Malaysian airline employee FireFly writes out his boarding pass by hand – Image: Reproduction/Social Media

A Malaysian medical student who had a FireFly flight posted on X: “Handwritten boarding pass. Thanks, Microsoft.”

At another airport, a passenger from Ryanair, a low-cost airline, wrote:

“Although we were afraid of being taken over by robots, what we got was a boarding pass that looked like a bus ticket from the 90s,” said Tufan Boyraz, from Turkey.

A Ryanair passenger displays a manual boarding pass after an internet outage – Image: Reproduction/Social Media

The reports come mainly from IndiGo, from India, and FireFly, from Malaysia.

IndiGo reposted one of the hand cards and wrote with an X: “Thank you for your patience during the service disruption. We hope the old vibes make your journey memorable.”

The company also said it regrets the impact on travel caused by the worldwide outage. “Our team is working tirelessly to resolve the issue and restore normal service as quickly as possible.”

In a statement, FireFly also apologized for the inconvenience, thanked them for their patience and said their team is working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

Understanding the Cyber Blackout That Has Affected the World

Blue Screen: Understanding Cyber Disruption

North American company CrowdStrike reported that its tool, called Falcon, which is used to detect potential hacker incursions, had encountered a software update issue.

One of the customers affected by the failure was Microsoft, which saw all of its services cut off. Users around the world reported on social media that when they turned on their computers, their Windows system crashed, showing a “blue screen.”

This is because Microsoft has a cloud computing program called Azure, which uses Falcon.

☁️ Cloud computing is a storage service used by companies in various sectors to host large amounts of information, such as customer data, for example. In addition to Microsoft with Azure, other tech giants, such as Google and Amazon, offer cloud solutions to other companies.

The Windows owner stated at around 8:10 AM (Brasilia time) that the outage has already been resolved, but that there may still be remaining issues. For example, Teams, PowerBI, and Fabric apps were unstable until the latest update to this report.