Disruptions were reported today across airlines, supermarkets, banking and communications services, as well as the NHS and trains.
Crowdstrike, which provides cyberattack monitoring and protection for many large companies, said the issue was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” adding that it was not a security incident or cyberattack. .
Latest Worldwide IT Outage News
Sky News has been tracking issues such as flight delays and cancellations, reports of service outages and Google searches to see when people started to notice problems.
Airlines
The first signs of trouble in the UK came from users of Ryanair, British Airways and WizzAir airline services.
Air travelers often wake up early to get to the airport, and check-in issues can cause additional stress and panic. Reports began around 7am, before peaking around 8:30am.
Ryanair had the highest number of outage reports according to Downdetector, a website that records issues people have raised with IT and connectivity services.
By 10:30am, more than nine in 10 flights from some of the UK’s major airports had been delayed or canceled.
Passengers at airports across Europe were also affected, with Amsterdam Schipol, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Stuttgart and Naples reporting major disruptions.
Around half of Ryanair’s issues were related to check-in, with the remainder split between website and app issues.
More than three-quarters of British Airways outage reports were related to check-in, while more people were experiencing problems with the Wizz Air app.
Bank officer
Reports on banking services such as Visa and Mastercard, and individual banks such as Nationwide and Lloyds, also started to arrive earlier. They started around 7am but peaked a little later at 8am.
Visa appears to have been most affected, with the problems split evenly between purchases and payments.
Across the country there were also issues relating specifically to online banking, with two-thirds of reports citing this issue.
Supermarkets
The first supermarket editions started arriving around 9am, peaking around 10am.
There have been fewer reports from the likes of Waitrose and Lidl compared to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, but that doesn’t mean they have been less affected.
It could just be a reflection of the fact that more people are trying to interact with the services of Britain’s two biggest supermarkets.
The majority of reports – around three-quarters in total across all supermarkets – were related to checkout, with website issues and order tracking accounting for the remainder.
So far, there have been fewer reports about any issues relating to grocery app services, but again, this could be a reflection of which services people use most often, rather than them being immune to problems.
Communications
Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 were particularly affected – there were a number of reports at 8am as people tried to log in to check email or messages.
There also appears to have been a smaller increase in reported issues with other communication channels, including WhatsApp and O2.
The majority of problems reported with WhatsApp were related to sending messages, and two-thirds of problems reported with O2 were related to a lack of signal, with a further 21% related to mobile internet.
The majority of Microsoft 365 issue reports were related to server connection issues, while a quarter were related to login issues and a fifth were related to OneDrive.
The way many people first noticed problems with their Microsoft products was by seeing a “blue screen of death” on their computer monitors.
Google searches for the term “blue screen” today reached their highest level in five years.
Searches across the world peaked at 7:15am UK time, with people in Australia, China, India and North America searching for the term.
Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia are the three territories with the highest relative search interest in the last 24 hours, but this may be because they were more likely to have been awake when the problems began.
The live map provided by internet monitoring firm Thousand Eyes showed that apps and networks reported outages on every continent.
The map shows a particularly high number of outages reported in Europe, the United States and Australia.
We’ll update this story later to see which services have recovered and which are experiencing lasting problems.
O Data and forensic analysis The team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to delivering transparent Sky News journalism. We gather, analyze and visualize data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite imagery, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia narrative we aim to better explain the world and at the same time show how our journalism is done.
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