Bhavish Aggarwal says ‘deliberate action by bad actors’ can cause outages; 80% of India’s data stored abroad at risk

Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and chief executive officer of Ola Cabs, while commenting on the Microsoft Windows outage on July 19, said outages could happen due to “deliberate action by bad actors". On Friday, a flawed software update sent out by a cybersecurity company caused major computer outages around the world, and millions of Windows users are experiencing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error which is causing the system to suddenly shut down or restart.

In a post on the social media platform X, he said, “On the @Microsoft outage, here’s the main thing I feel we can do. Outages are momentary with no deliberate intent to cause harm. Can happen once in a while to any company.”

"It represents an outcome that could also happen due to deliberate action by bad actors and intentions," he added.

The Microsoft outage, where a CrowdStrike update in Windows 10 resulted in a blue screen error and put the computers in a restarting loop, affected airports, banks and government offices.

The Ola CEO noted that the majority of India's data is stored abroad, which poses a risk for both entities and people.

“Since 80% of our data is stored outside India, we won’t be able to do anything,” said Aggarwal. The government needs to recognise the risk of the data staying abroad and focus on data localisation norms to address these risks, he stated.

Microsot Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella also took to X to post an update on the matter. He said Microsoft is working closely with CrowdStrike to recover the issue caused due to the update released on Thursday and get the systems back online.

“Yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that began impacting IT systems globally. We are aware of this issue and are working closely with CrowdStrike and across the industry to provide customers technical guidance and support to safely bring their systems back online,” said Nadella.

Bloomberg reported, quoting CloudStrike, that all the computers impacted by the Windows update and the global IT standstill will need a manual reboot.