A major global outage impacting computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system has resulted in the grounding of several major global airlines, disrupted television news broadcasts and pushed banking services offline early on Friday.
Enterprise PCs running Microsoft's Windows faced a global outage early on Friday.
The outage has been blamed on a software update by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which has resulted in many Windows PCs experiencing the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) while booting.
In an update on its cloud service Azure’s status page, Microsoft said it is aware of the issue affecting machines running Windows, and noted it is affecting systems running CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, nearly all major American carriers—including Delta, American and United—have been forced to temporarily ground all their flights due to the outage.
Major carriers and airports in other parts of the world—like Air India, KLM, Hong Kong International Airport and others—have also reported disruptions, forcing some of them to rely on manual check-ins.
Crowdstrike’s shares tanked nearly 16.8% to $285.49 in pre-market trading, while Microsoft’s stock slipped around 2.3% to $430.28.
This is a developing story.