A massive Microsoft system failure has sparked chaos around the world – grounding flights and knocking hospitals, GP surgeries, train services, banks, stock exchanges and TV channels offline, Daily mail reports.
According to the report by Daily Mail, the Microsoft technical fault has caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to suddenly turn off at airports including Gatwick and Edinburgh on one of the busiest days for global aviation since Covid.
Britain’s biggest train firm told passengers to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues’, Ryanair and Wizz Air are warning of ‘disruption’, and NHS staff have described logging on to find most of the non-clinical systems are down.
Microsoft has confirmed it was investigating an ‘issue’ with its 365 apps and operating systems and said users should expect ‘service degradation’. US cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error and said they are ‘working on it’.
Windows is the most used operating system in the world, meaning the outage is affecting almost every part of the global economy – with restaurants and cafes, including the bakery chain Gail’s, unable to take card payments.
The outage is also affecting some NHS systems, including those used by GP surgeries around the world banks, supermarkets and other major institutions said computer issues were disrupting services, while huge queues have been seen at airports including Gatwick and Luton.
GPs have also been hit, with surgeries in Cumbria, Cheshire, Yorkshire and the West Midlands taking to social media to say their systems had been affected.
The LSE Group, which operates the London stock exchange, said it was experiencing a global technical issue preventing news from being published.
Even football clubs have been affected, with Blackburn Rovers telling fans that its ticketing platform was malfunctioning. Microsoft 365 say they are investigating an issue impacting users’ ability to access apps and services.
‘Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions,’ they said on X this morning.’We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue.’
It comes amid reports of widespread IT outages affecting airlines, broadcasters and banks.
Among the impacted firms are Ryanair, with the airline posting to its website: ‘Potential disruptions across the network (Fri 19 July) due to a global third party system outage.
‘Affected passengers will be notified and any passengers travelling across the network on Fri 19 July should check their Ryanair app for the latest updates on their flight.
‘We advise passengers to arrive at the airport three hours in advance of their flight to avoid any disruptions.
‘We regret any inconvenience caused to passengers by this third party IT issue, which is outside of Ryanair’s control and affects all airlines operating across the network.’
Edinburgh Airport said the IT outage is causing longer waiting times.
Stansted Airport said that some airline check-in services are being done manually as a result of the IT outage, but ‘flights are still operating as normal’.
Meanwhile, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) – parent company of Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern – warned passengers to expect delays because of the issue.
The firm posted on social media: ‘We are currently experiencing widespread IT issues across our entire network. Our IT teams are actively investigating to determine the root cause of the problem.
‘We are unable to access driver diagrams at certain locations, leading to potential short-notice cancellations, particularly on the Thameslink and Great Northern networks.
‘Additionally, other key systems, including our real-time customer information platforms, are also affected. We will provide additional updates when we can. In the meantime, please regularly check your journey before you travel.’
In the US, emergency services lines are reportedly down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.
Microsoft users around the world have taken to social media to express their frustration and confusion at their computers also shutting down. Sky Sports Presenter Jacquie Beltrao has posted on X saying: ‘We’re obviously not on air – we’re trying @SkyNews Breakfast.’
This has also lead to travel chaos as passengers attempting to board flights have been unable to check in due to the technical issues.
American Airlines was forced to ground its flights this morning due to a communication issue, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s status page.
Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, Allegiant and SunCountry had reported outages that affected operations.
Frontier said earlier that a ‘major Microsoft technical outage’ hit its operations temporarily, while SunCountry said a third-party vendor affected its booking and check-in facilities, without naming the company.
‘The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue,’ Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN.
A message on the CrowdStrike support page read: ‘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. Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.
‘Status updates will be posted below as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.’
Sky News and Microsoft have been contacted for comment.
Just two months ago Microsoft was hit with another major outage after Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, went down with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down.
According to reports the outage also impacted ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google’s dominance in the world of web searching, Bing’s API has numerous high profile clients.
In various reports on X, users said that they were either greeted with a blank page or a 429 HTTP code error when they attempted to log on.
Users claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading but neither were producing search results when a query was typed.