A major IT outage has reportedly hit banks, media outlets, and airlines on Friday, causing chaos at airport check-in and cancelled flights.
Reports of outages have been streaming in from around the globe, with broadcaster Sky News off air in the UK.
The outage has also impacted global customers of Microsoft's Azure and Office365 services, which first reported being hit about 18:00 ET on Thursday, or midnight CET.
In a post on X, the Big Tech giant said it was "investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services".
"We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue," it added.
Airlines such as Qantas in Australia and at least two low-cost carriers in the US - Frontier and Sun Country Airlines - have been forced to ground flights.
In Europe, users of Ryanair's app and website also complained and not being able to check in on Friday morning, with a surge of reports noted on the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
In a post on X, the airline confirmed it was "experiencing disruption" due to a "globe 3rd party IT outage".
Several European airports have reported IT issues, including Berlin Brandenberg Airport which has told customers to expect delays at check-in. At Edinburgh Airport in the UK, a computer error caused departure boards to freeze.
Amsterdam Schiphol has also reported issues with flights affected, as have airports in New Zealand, Japan and India.
What's caused the global outage?
According to initial reports, the IT outage has been blamed on a antivirus software update that has gone awry at global security firm, Crowdstrike.
Devices, such as computers and phones, have become "bricked," meaning that they're not able to function as they should due to corrupted software.
On Reddit, community users of the Crowdstrike subreddit (r/crowdstrike) have shared what is reported to be an advisory from the company issued to customers only that suggests the cause is its Falcon Sensor.
In the communiqué, the company says it is aware that customers are experiencing repeated BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) and are unable to reboot.
"CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor. Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor," it states.
(source: Euronews Next)
