Television channels, airports, London Stock Exchange and banks worldwide have been disrupted by a massive outage, causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show did not air on Friday morning and was replaced with archive footage.
Downdetector, a website monitoring outages, reported sudden spikes in issues with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites, and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company advised passengers to arrive at airports three hours early, attributing the delays to a “third-party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affects all airlines operating across the network.”
Users reported problems as far as Australia, New Zealand, India, and Japan, with the UK likely to be heavily impacted during Friday’s rush hour.
Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity researcher, posted on X about “something super weird happening right now,” with individuals worldwide experiencing the “blue screen of death” and entering recovery mode on their Windows computers.
Cybersecurity engineers identified a problem with Crowdstrike, an antivirus software, which appeared to be causing the crashes.
Senad Arun, founder of the cyber research company Imperum, described the incident as “Crowdstrike Doom’s Day.”
Crowdstrike acknowledged the issue on its website, stating: “Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows related to the Falcon Sensor.”
