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Businesses across the world, from airlines to financial services and media groups, were hit by a global IT outage on Friday, causing massive disruption to a wide range of services and operations.
Thousands of workers were unable to log on to their computers on Friday morning, disrupting businesses from finance to healthcare.
Australian businesses were the first to warn of problems, with the operations of retailers including Woolworths and 7-Eleven hit. Sydney airport said “a global technical outage” had affected its operations.
In Europe, airlines and airports warned of disruption.
The US Federal Aviation Administration said Delta, United and American Airlines had asked to ground flights due to take off.
According to multiple posts on social media, the outage has been blamed on an update to security software from US group CrowdStrike, which caused a problem with Microsoft’s Windows.
A statement shared on social media that was also posted on a site for CrowdStrike’s business customers said: “CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows.”
Berlin Brandenburg Airport said it had also been hit by “a technical fault”, and that passengers had been delayed checking in.
Aena, Spain’s main airports operator, said “operations are being carried out using manual systems” due to an “incident” in its IT system. “Disruptions are occurring in Aena’s systems and in Spain’s airports network, which could cause delays. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible,” it said.
Ryanair on Friday morning blamed a “third-party IT issue, which is outside of Ryanair’s control and affects all airlines operating across the network”.
The London Stock Exchange Group said it was investigating an issue with the publication of news announcements. Its news service was experiencing a “third-party global technical issue, which prevented news from being published”, according to a statement on the company’s website. LSEG said other systems including the exchange were running normally.
Earlier on Friday, Microsoft said some of its Azure cloud computing customers “may experience issues with multiple Azure services in the central US region” and that it was investigating the issues.
A status update on Friday morning said the company had “determined the underlying cause” — which did not appear to be a cyber attack but a technical problem — and that “the majority of services are now recovered”.
However, wider outages remained, with some users on Friday unable to access various of Microsoft’s 365 suite of apps and services, such as its Teams video conferencing tool.
Microsoft said it was treating the problem with “the highest priority and urgency” but that users would only see “gradual relief” as it tried to solve the problems, which appeared to have been caused by the same Azure issue.
David Rhodes, executive chair of Sky News, said on X that the broadcaster had “not been able to broadcast live TV this morning, currently telling viewers that we apologise for the interruption”.
CrowdStrike is a cyber security company that has been vocal in criticising Microsoft for the series of attacks the company has recently had to contend with. The company this year launched a product designed to work alongside Microsoft’s own antivirus Defender tool.
Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s senior vice-president of counter adversary, told the FT in May that demand for the product had been “incredible”, with businesses keen to “shore up this Microsoft [security] problem . . . Microsoft has repeatedly failed in this area”.
