NEW YORK — A major IT outage has brought banks, media outlets, and airlines grinding to a halt on Friday, causing chaos at airport check-in, canceled flights, and disrupted services worldwide.

Reports of outages have been streaming in from around the globe, with broadcaster Sky News in the UK forced off the air for hours on Friday morning.

The outage has also impacted global customers of Microsoft's Azure and Office365 services, which first reported being hit about 18.00 ET on Thursday, or midnight CET on Friday.

In a post on X, the Big Tech giant said it was "investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services".

"We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue to mitigate the issue," it added.

Airlines such as Qantas in Australia and at least two low-cost carriers in the US - Frontier and Sun Country Airlines - have been forced to ground flights.

In Europe, users of Ryanair's app and website also complained about not being able to check in for their flights on Friday morning, with a surge of reports noted on the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

In a post on X, the airline confirmed it was "experiencing disruption" due to a "globe 3rd party IT outage".

Several European airports have reported IT issues, including Berlin Brandenberg Airport which has told customers to expect delays at check-in. At Edinburgh Airport in the UK, a computer error caused departure boards to freeze.

Amsterdam Schiphol has also reported issues with flights affected, as have airports in New Zealand, Japan, and India.

Switzerland's largest airport, Zurich is currently stopping aircraft from landing.

In the UK, supermarkets like Aldi, Morrison's, and Waitrose reported experiencing issues accepting card payments.

Hospitals, pharmacies, and doctors' surgeries have also been hit, reporting difficulties retrieving medical records, with reports of two German hospitals in Luebeck and Kiel cancelling non-urgent surgeries.

According to initial reports, the IT outage has been blamed on an antivirus software update at global security firm, Crowdstrike that has gone awry.

Devices, such as computers and phones, have become "bricked," meaning that they're not able to function as they should due to corrupted software.

On Reddit, community users of the Crowdstrike subreddit (r/crowdstrike) have shared what is reported to be an advisory from the company issued to customers only that suggests the cause is its Falcon Sensor.

In the communiqué, the company says it is aware that customers are experiencing repeated BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) and are unable to reboot their devices.

"CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor. Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheckblue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor," it states.

Euronews Next has contacted Crowdstrike directly to confirm.

Regarding Friday's outage, Lauren Wills-Dixon, a data privacy expert at UK-based law firm Gordons, told Euronews Next: "We don’t yet know the cause of these outages, but it appears this is linked to Microsoft and Crowdstrike which would explain disruption across sectors and globally.

"Outages can be created by several causes and Microsoft has named a ‘technical issue’ rather than a cyber incident," she added.

"We’ll likely find out more as the hours progress, but this shows just how reliant we are on certain tech, how much trust organisations put in them and their security practices, and also the chaos that downtime can cause". — Euronews