This was a separate outage unrelated to CrowdStrike a few hours earlier that took down a couple of airlines as well.
A majority of the VMs in the Azure CentralUS datacenter went down due to some sort of backend storage issue.
Edit: I guess I should have read the article they do say CrowdStrike. They seem to be implying that they were one event when the cloud services outage was earlier and unrelated. I had heard about grounded flights during the first outage as well. So they likely are combining the two events here.
In any KDE app you can connect with SFTP in the open file dialog. Just type sftp://user@server/path and you can browse/open/edit files the remote server. ssh keys+agent make things a lot easier here obviously.