India Financial News

Follow Microsoft Outage Live Updates hereIs this a cyberattack? How did the outage happen? Why is Microsoft in news? What is CrowdStike? What did the Indian government say on the IT outage? And why is the "blue screen of death" trending? When will the issue be fixed? And can we call it the “largest" IT outage in history? Here's all you need to know about the global outage on Friday.Cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt said in a post on X, "I don't think it's too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history" He was quoted by CNBC as saying, "Ongoing tech disruption is set to be the largest IT outage in history." Meanwhile, " an opinion piece in Sky news.com read, “It's possible we are looking at the largest IT outage in history.""This is not a security incident or cyberattack," CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz clarified on Friday. He said there was "a defect found in a single content update for [Microsoft] Windows hosts".

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) on Friday reported a 5% decline in its consolidated net profit to Rs 15,138 crore for the first quarter ended June 2024. The same stood at Rs 16,011 crore in the year-ago period. Revenue from operations increased 12% year-on-year (YoY) to Rs 2.36 lakh crore in the reporting period.

Quick commerce platforms like Zomato’s Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart are in advanced talks with leading apparel and shoe manufacturers like Arvind Fashions, Fabindia, Woodland and Puma to sell their products to capitalise on a large section of consumers in top 15 cities moving to buy products other than groceries through quick commerce, multiple industry executives said. Fabindia has already finalised terms with Instamart whereby a tenth of the unsold stock will be taken back by the apparel manufacturer, and there will be a no-return policy for consumers. Others like Woodland are negotiating for store-return. Quick commerce firms currently do not have any return policy for products sold through their platform. These startups are hoping to exploit the growing fashion business, which is currently the second-largest selling category in India's e-commerce industry after electronics and smartphones, accounting for around 20-25% of sales. Quick commerce companies are also foraying into electronics and smartphones as ET recently reported.

logistics-as-a-service on the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), touched one million transactions in June, ONDC said, on Friday. This is an initiative bridging the demand gap for third-party logistics and the delivery of products across the network.

Livemint, Ranjit Babu, Director of Wireless and Home Entertainment at Amazon India, shared insights into the evolving landscape of consumer electronics, how smartphone penetration is rapidly increasing in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, upcoming offers for Prime Day 2024, and much more.Here are the edited excerpts:Amazon has observed a notable shift in consumer behaviour towards premium and ultra-premium products. In the television segment, 4K TVs now dominate the market, with nearly two-thirds of Amazon's TV sales coming from this category.

telecom operators, Jio Infocomm, on Friday unveiled that the company's average revenue per user remained muted at Rs 181.7 per subscriber on monthly basis for the first quarter of the financial year. Additionally, the Reliance-owned telco announced that it had new 8 million net additions in 1Q FY25 with monthly churn at 1.7%. “Ubiquitous, high-quality, affordable internet is the backbone of Digital India and Jio takes pride in contributing to this. Our new prepaid plans would foster industry innovation towards 5G and AI and drive sustainable growth. Jio with its superior network and new service propositions would further build its market leadership with a customer first approach," said Akash M Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm.

Indian students back home on Friday from Bangladesh, where violence has erupted between protesters and security forces. At least 20 people have been killed in the clashes this week — most of them in the capital Dhaka — with police firing tear gas and rubber bullets to scatter protesters who also torched vehicles and establishments. The protesters oppose a system of quotas for government jobs. Some mobile internet services were cut off on Thursday and telecom links remained widely disrupted on Friday.

Arunachal Pradesh which poses a threat of a flood-like situation in the state, senior BJP MLA Ninong Ering on Friday urged the government to take up the issue with the Centre. China is building a 60,000 megawatt dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Medog, near the international border. Tsangpo is known as Siang in Arunachal Pradesh and Brahmaputra in Assam. The main channel of this river is the Jamuna, which flows through Bangladesh before joining the Bay of Bengal. Participating in the motion of thanks to the governor's address in the assembly, Ering, a former Union minister said, «We cannot trust our 'neighbour'. You never know what they can do. They can either divert the entire river flow drying up our Siang or release water at once causing unprecedented floods havoc downstream.»

India will be the engine of green energy growth for the world as the the country is expected to have an installed electrolyser manufacturing capacity of up to 100 GW by 2030, Union Minister Pralhad Joshi said on Friday. The Minister for New and Renewable Energy made the remarks while inaugurating an electrolyser manufacturing facility of a private company at Doddaballapur, in Karnataka. «India has the potential to be the driver of growth for green energy in the world. The demand for green hydrogen shall fuel demand for electrolysers in India. By 2030, it is likely India shall have installed electrolyser capacity of 60 GW-100 GW,» he added. His comments assume significance as the government has set up a target to have 5 million metric tonne (MMT) of installed green hydrogen mission capacity.

IT outage affecting Microsoft's Azure cloud platform has caused major disruptions in the aviation sector, leading to the cancellation of over 200 flights by IndiGo. This global incident, which began on July 19, 2024, has had a cascading effect on travel systems worldwide, severely impacting airline operations. IndiGo’s Operational Challenges IndiGo, one of India’s largest carriers, has reported substantial operational disruptions. The airline announced on X, «Flights are cancelled due to the cascading effect of the worldwide travel system outage, beyond our control. The option to rebook/claim a refund is temporarily unavailable.» The outage has impacted IndiGo's flight operations, check-in systems, and baggage handling.

Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi on Friday said his party would not let Tripura, which has been rocked by violence over panchayat elections, turn into another Manipur. Gogoi, the deputy leader of the Congress in Lok Sabha, led a delegation of his party that visited the violence-affected areas of the state. «The Congress firmly stands with its leaders, workers and the people of Tripura during these difficult times. The Congress will not bow down to terror tactics of the BJP,» he said, addressing a press conference at the party's state headquarters in Agartala. «We will inform the party high command what we saw in Tripura during our two-day visit. PM Narendra Modi is saying that India is the mother of democracy but what we saw here is nothing short of murder of democracy,» he added.

banks whether their customer-facing channels- branches, ATM, mobile banking and net banking — were operating well after technical problem at the US tech giant Microsoft and its vendor American cyber security company Crowdstrike, led to a global tech outage. The banking regulator has made similar enquiries with payment aggregators, they added. The banking regulator has asked banks and payment aggregators to update them on the impact of the outage. Most banks and payment companies told ET that their services were not affected. Speaking to a wire agency, Dinesh Khara indicated that their systems were not affected. «We are all fine,” he told the wire agency.

Microsoft Services, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday said that it has conducted a thorough assessment to estimate the impact of this outage on its regulated entities, particularly within the Indian financial sector. The assessment revealed that around 10 banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) experienced minor disruptions, which have either been resolved or are currently being addressed. According to the central bank, critical systems of most banks are not hosted in the cloud, and only a handful have adopted the CrowdStrike tool for cybersecurity.

skilling is key to equip locals to meet evolving industry demands as employment is based on merit and not domicile. HR experts believe implementing a legislation like the job-for-locals bill would pose significant challenges for businesses in talent acquisition, compliance costs and stressed on the importance of skilling to equip individuals with future-proof skillsets. The Karnataka government on July 15, tabled the Karnataka State Employment of Local Candidates in the Industries, Factories and Other Establishments Bill, 2024, in state assembly. The Bill, which mandated factory or other establishments to appoint 50 per cent of local candidates in management categories and 70 per cent in non-management categories, has been temporarily put on hold.

Bombay High Court on Friday quashed the Maharashtra government's notification that exempted private schools within a one-kilometre radius of government or aided schools from Right to Education (RTE) Act quota admissions. A division bench of Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya and Justice Amit Borkar said the notification dated February 9 was «ultra vires» to Article 21 of the Constitution of India and provisions of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, also known as the RTE. «The notification is held to be null and void,» the court said. The court, in its judgment, said the mandate of the law casts a duty not only on the government but also on private unaided schools to provide education to children in the age group of six to 14 years from the disadvantaged section of society.

Mint. Sheth can afford to say that. He has the distinction of scaling two unicorns—Elance (renamed as Upwork), and Gupshup—across two different geographies.

dholwallas, who are being flown in from Delhi. “Tani (Tanishqa) was feeling FOMO," laughs Chheda, when asked the reason behind a non-traditional, joint barat. “She doesn’t want to wait around and miss the fun of making a grand entry." For the reception, they’ve decided to turn a ballroom into a forest.

IT cities like Hyderabad, Pune, and Delhi-NCR due to more investor-friendly employment policies, reported TOI. Telangana might become the state that benefits the most as it offers incentive-based employer policies, while Hyderabad has been in tough competition with India's start-up capital, Bengaluru. The Siddaramaiah-led Congress government’s new reservation demands for locals in Karnataka might lead to flight risks by several investors currently based in India’s Silicon Valley. “All the GCC movement is in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Future growth will start moving to competing cities like Hyderabad and even Pune and Delhi NCR,” said a top executive official of a global financial services giant to TOI. Moreover, though HYSEA president Prashant Nandella told TOI it is still too early to speculate, he believes such a policy might benefit pro-industry states such as Telangana. In addition, former CII Telangana Vagish Dixit told TOI that investors have a choice to move and might fly to other states as a result of such counterproductive policies.

Union Budget and the Economic Survey, to set the tone and pace of the economic path the nation will pursue in the coming years to attain its ambitious growth aspirations with a human face. The allocations and source of funds must be in sync with the vision so laid out.

Gujarat has rolled out a dedicated policy for the semiconductor sector and chip manufacturing will commence soon in the state, Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel said on Friday, assuring that his government will provide necessary assistance to the industry. Patel was speaking after inaugurating the daylong 'Gujarat SemiConnect Conference 2024', covering various avenues of the semiconductor sector, at the Mahatma Mandir convention centre here. Micron Technology, Tata Electronics and CG Power, which are building their semiconductor plants in Gujarat, have collaborated with the state government as knowledge partners for the conference. Semiconductors, also referred to as integrated circuits or microchips, are an essential component of electronic devices, facilitating communications, military systems, healthcare, computing, transportation, clean energy, and several other applications.

Budget 2024: In the past few years, India's middle class taxpayers have routinely witnessed high pre-budget expectations turning into deep post-budget disappointment. This time, however, some analysts reckon that there appears to be a more realistic chance of budget sops for taxpayers because of the relatively weak mandate that Modi govt got, which apparently underlined the discontent among some key voter groups including the urban middle class. The interim budget tabled by FM Nirmala Sitharaman ahead of the 2024 general elections did not have any significant announcement on tax matters. There, however, were a few initiatives aimed at the common man in areas such as healthcare, housing and power. Here is a look at some of the important Interim Budget announcements in areas that have a direct bearing on the common man.