World brought to a halt by drastic Microsoft outage

Flights have been cancelled and TV stations have been taken online in a drastic computer outage.

Windows PCs on Friday inexplicably started showing a “blue screen of death” error that left them unusable.

That led to problems at many of the world’s biggest companies, including airlines, TV stations and banks.

Issues had been found across the world, according to cyber security companies. The problem appears to relate to a broken cyber security update that left computers unable to start up.

Sky News is offline, airports are unable to check in flights, trains were disrupted and banks warned that customers might not be able to make payments.

Tracking website Down Detector registered outages and problems at a huge array of companies: Delta Airlines, Visa, Mastercard, Lloyds Bank, Santander, Amazon, RyanAir, Sky News, Ladbrokes, BT, and Microsoft Teams all show issues. It is not clear whether all of them are linked to the problem with PCs.

Delta, United and American airlines were all grounded in the US, according to the Federal Aviation Authority. Around the world, flights and train operators were hit by problems.

Govia Thameslink Railway – the UK’s busiest train operator, which runs the Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern services around London – said that it was experiencing “widespread IT issues”. RyanAir said it was a “global third party IT outage” and advised travellers to arrive “at least three hours before” their flights.

We are currently experiencing widespread IT issues across our entire network,” it said. It meant that trains might be cancelled at short notice and that there would be issues getting real-time information to customers.

On Sky News, viewers were shown an error message that indicated the transmission had gone down.

“We apologise for the interruption to this broadcast,” it read. “We hope to restore the transmission of Sky News shortly.”

The trouble appears to relate to an issue at Crowdstrike, a cyber security company, which may have released a problem update. It said early in the morning that it had identified the issue and rolled the update back – but those computers that were already affected do not appear to have been fixed.

On the company’s Reddit thread, representatives advised that the problem could be fixed by deleting the update and then restarting the computer. That requires administrators to have access to the computer, however, which may not be immediately possible for those that are being used remotely.