Global IT outage grounds aviation, media and financial services

A major global cyber outage has disrupted operations for airlines, banks, and media outlets across multiple countries, including Singapore, the United States, and Australia. The IT outage, which began early Friday, has caused significant service interruptions worldwide.

Several airports and airlines have reported issues with their IT systems, leading to grounded flights and delays. Sydney Airport has experienced flight disruptions, while United Airlines has halted operations. The London Stock Exchange Group’s platform is also facing interruptions.

In Germany, Berlin Airport has reported IT system issues causing check-in delays due to a technical fault. Sky News is off-air as a result of the outage, with Sky News Executive Chairman David Rhodes confirming the inability to broadcast live this morning. Rhodes stated, “Sky News has not been able to broadcast live TV this morning. Much of our news report is still available online, and we are working hard to restore all services.”

Rail transportation has also been affected, with UK’s Govia Thameslink Railway reporting widespread IT issues across its network, leading to potential short-notice cancellations, particularly on the Thameslink and Great Northern lines. The company’s real-time customer information platforms are also impacted.

Telstra Group, an Australian telecommunications firm, reported service disruptions linked to global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft. “Global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems,” Telstra Group stated on social media.

Microsoft attributed the disruption to a configuration change in a portion of its Azure backend workloads, causing connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services. The affected services include PowerBI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 admin center, and Microsoft Purview.

“We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact,” Microsoft stated. The tech giant noted that some services, such as Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Intune, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online, have been restored.

As global efforts continue to resolve the outage, businesses and services worldwide are working to mitigate the impacts and restore normal operations.