A global IT outage on Friday disrupted businesses worldwide, impacting a broad range of services from airlines to financial institutions and media companies.

Social media attributed the outage to an update in CrowdStrike security software, which caused issues with Windows software. The outage affected businesses in multiple countries, including Australia.

Airports in Europe

Airports in Europe warned passengers of potential delays due to IT problems.

Similarly, Berlin Brandenburg Airport experienced a "technical fault," resulting in delayed passenger check-ins.

Spain's main airport operator, Aena, stated that operations were being conducted manually due to an "incident" in its IT system, which could cause delays across its network. Aena is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

Ryanair also reported a "third-party IT issue" affecting all airlines across the network, beyond its control.

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) announced it was investigating a technical issue preventing the publication of news announcements. While other systems, including the exchange, were functioning normally, LSEG's news service faced a "third-party global technical issue."

US airlines disrupted

Major U.S. carriers including American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines issued ground stops on Friday morning citing communication issues, less than an hour after Microsoft resolved its cloud services outage that impacted several low-cost carriers.

It was not immediately clear whether the call to keep flights from taking off were related to the earlier Microsoft cloud outage. Apart from American and Delta, UAL and Allegiant Air too grounded flights.

Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, Allegiant and SunCountry had earlier reported outages that affected operations. Frontier said late Thursday that it was in the process of resuming normal operations, and that the ground stop had been lifted.

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.

Media, retailers, banks, airlines, telecoms hit in Australia, News Zealand

The cyber outage related to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and Microsoft hit media, retailers, banks, airlines and telecoms companies across Australia and New Zealand on Friday.

Australia's largest bank, Commonwealth Bank said some customers had been unable to transfer money due to the service outage. National airline Qantas and Sydney airport said planes were delayed but still flying.

Sydney Airport reported that a "global technical outage" impacted its operations, advising passengers to expect delays even though flights were still departing and arriving on schedule.

Victorian state police said some internal systems had been hit by the outage but emergency services were operating normally. The output of a number of media companies was also disrupted.

"Like a number of other organisations, global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems," a spokesperson for telecoms firm Telstra said on Friday.

"The issue is causing some holdups for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience."

Crowdstrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday when Reuters contacted its technical support saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft's Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor, without mentioning Australia.

There was no information to suggest the outage was a cyber security incident, the office of Australia's National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X.

"I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” it said in the statement which did not mention Crowdstrike.

"Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies."

A spokesperson for New Zealand's parliament said its computer systems had also been affected.

State broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a "major network outage", without giving a reason.

In a pre-recorded message played on Sky News Australia as regular programming was disrupted, correspondent Tom Connell said the outage was not believed to be the result of a hack.

"Our computers, our systems are down, all the things that make Sky News run down and indeed for many other major companies around the country," he said.

A Reuters reporter saw error messages on payment systems at grocery chain Harris Farm in Sydney on Friday.

Sky News offline

Britain's Sky News, one of the country's major television news channels, was off air on Friday.

"Sky News have not been able to broadcast live TV this morning, currently telling viewers that we apologise for the interruption," the broadcaster's executive chairman David Rhodes said on X.

A global tech outage was affecting operations across different countries including at Spanish airports, a Turkish airline and Australian media and banks.

Microsoft indicated early on Friday that some Azure cloud computing customers in the central US region might encounter issues with multiple Azure services. The company identified the root cause as a technical problem, not a cyber attack, and stated that "the majority of services are now recovered."

Nonetheless, broader outages persisted, affecting access to Microsoft's 365 suite of apps and services, including Teams. Microsoft assured that it was addressing the problem with the "highest priority and urgency," though users would experience "gradual relief" as the issues were resolved, all stemming from the Azure problem.