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Businesses across the world, from airlines to financial services and media groups, were hit by a global IT outage on Friday, causing disruption to a wide range of services.
The outage has been blamed on social media on an update to the CrowdStrike security software, causing an issue with Windows software. The IT issues have also affected businesses in countries such as Australia.
Airports in Europe and Australia have warned passengers of possible delays because of IT problems.
Sydney Airport said “a global technical outage” had affected its operations. It told passengers to expect delays, although flights were departing and arriving as planned.
Berlin Brandenburg Airport said it had also been hit by “a technical fault”, and that passengers had been delayed checking in.
Aena, Spain’s main airports operator, said “operations are being carried out using manual systems” due to an “incident” in its IT system. “Disruptions are occurring in Aena’s systems and in Spain’s airports network, which could cause delays. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible,” it said.
Ryanair on Friday morning blamed a “third-party IT issue, which is outside of Ryanair’s control and affects all airlines operating across the network”.
The London Stock Exchange Group said it was investigating an issue with the publication of news announcements. Its news service was experiencing a “third-party global technical issue, which prevented news from being published”, according to a statement on the company’s website. LSEG said other systems including the exchange were running normally.
Microsoft said early on Friday that some of its Azure cloud computing customers “may experience issues with multiple Azure services in the central US region” and that it was investigating the issues.
A status update on Friday morning said the company had “determined the underlying cause” — which did not appear to be a cyber attack but a technical problem — and that “the majority of services are now recovered”.
However, wider outages remained with some users on Friday unable to access various of Microsoft’s 365 suite of apps and services, such as its Teams video conferencing tool.
Microsoft said it was treating the problem with “the highest priority and urgency” but that users would only see “gradual relief” as it tried to solve the problems, which appeared to have been caused by the same Azure issue.
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