A global outage at Microsoft is affecting banks, supermarkets, airlines and the media in various parts of the world this Friday. British television station Sky News, for example, was unable to broadcast live this morning.
According to Reuters, at Berlin airport in Germany, traffic was disrupted until 8am local time and check-ins were delayed because of the global outage, as was Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, with flights being affected.
In Spain, all airports suffered from the computer glitch. Edinburgh airport, meanwhile, is having difficulties maintaining operations, as automatic boarding pass scanners and security monitors have shown a security message saying ‘server offline’, reports Reuters, adding that boarding passes are being checked manually.
Delays related to the problem are also expected at Sydney and Melbourne airports in Australia.
“A global technical fault has affected some airline operations and terminal services. Flights are currently arriving and departing, but there may be some delays throughout the night.
We have activated our contingency plans with our partner airlines and deployed additional staff to our terminals to assist passengers. Anyone travelling today should arrive at the airport in plenty of time and check with their airline about the status of their flight,’ reads the statement from Sydney Airport.
In addition, major US airlines such as Delta, United, American Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Allegiant and SunCountry were grounded.
According to Reuters, at Berlin airport in Germany, traffic was disrupted until 8am local time and check-ins were delayed because of the global outage, as was Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, with flights being affected
According to Downdetector (a platform that monitors the status and uptime of online services), in Portugal, Vodafone, NOS and MEO are experiencing outages this morning. Santander bank and Caixa Geral de Depósitos are also affected.
In a statement, Microsoft says that it is resolving the ‘persistent impact’ of the 365 applications which are in a ‘degraded state’, and that the fault is affecting Windows computers in various parts of the world. The tech giant guarantees that it is taking ‘mitigation measures’.
‘Our services are in the process of being recovered as we take mitigation measures,’ wrote the company on the social network X (formerly Twitter). In a message entitled ‘Service degradation’, Microsoft states that users ‘may not be able to access various Microsoft 365 applications and services’.
According to cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, problems have also been reported in India, Australia and New Zealand, with reports of faults in Microsoft’s Windows operating system being related to its Falcon sensor.
According to Downdetector, since last night there have been sudden spikes in incidents on various sites that include Microsoft applications.
CNN reports that in the Azure cloud software status report, Microsoft says that the service went down for some customers in the centre of the United States at around 6pm local time, ‘including failures in service management operations and connectivity or service availability’, and the cause has already been determined.