Sky News is currently off air, after a flawed anti-viral update has left Microsoft Windows users globally kicked out of their systems.
The broadcaster was forced to play old documentary footage, as it scrambled to sort the situation out at 6am this morning, as it quickly unraveled that train operators, airlines, and banks had also been effected.
US cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error, as they report on their website they are ‘working on it’.
Sky News viewers were left with a static message on their TVs apologising for the ‘disruption’ to the service at 6am when broadcasting was meant to begin.
It read: ‘We apologise for the interuption to this broadcast. We hope to restore the transmission of Sky News shortly.’
Ryanair has also seemingly been hit with the issue after it posted on its website urging passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a ‘third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network’.
The issue is impacting companies globally with online reports that Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, the US and the UK have all been effected.
Sky News has gone off air, as the TV channel appears to be hit with ongoing technical issues
UK Sky Sports Presenter Jacquie Beltrao posted on X: ‘We’re obviously not on air – we’re trying @SkyNews Breakfast’
One ABC reporter posted on X a photo of his computer down
One user wrote about how she is ready for an early weekend after Microsoft went down
All four of Govia Thameslink Railway’s brands – Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern – posted on social media: ‘We are currently experiencing widespread IT issues across our entire network.
‘Our IT teams are actively investigating to determine the root cause of the problem.
‘We are unable to access driver diagrams at certain locations, leading to potential short-notice cancellations, particularly on the Thameslink and Great Northern networks.
‘Additionally, other key systems, including our real-time customer information platforms, are also affected.
‘We will provide additional updates when we can. In the meantime, please regularly check your journey before you travel.’
While in the US emergency services lines are reportedly down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.
Microsoft has posted on its social media account that is was ‘investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services’.
Microsoft users around the world have taken to social media to express their frustration and confusion at their computers also shutting down.
Sky Sports Presenter Jacquie Beltrao has posted on X saying: ‘We’re obviously not on air – we’re trying @SkyNews Breakfast.’
This has also lead to travel chaos as passengers attempting to board flights have been unable to check in due to the technical issues.
American Airlines was forced to ground its flights this morning due to a communication issue, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s status page.
Microsoft users around the world have taken to social media to express their confusion at their computers shutting down
One user was quite excited for the early weekend
Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, Allegiant and SunCountry had reported outages that affected operations.
Frontier said earlier that a ‘major Microsoft technical outage’ hit its operations temporarily, while SunCountry said a third-party vendor affected its booking and check-in facilities, without naming the company.
‘The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue,’ Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN.
A message on the CrowdStrike support page read: ‘CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.
‘Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.
‘Status updates will be posted below as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.’
Sky News and Microsoft have been contacted for comment.
Just two months ago Microsoft was hit with another major outage after Bing.com, Microsoft‘s search engine, went down with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down.
According to reports the outage also impacted ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google‘s dominance in the world of web searching, Bing’s API has numerous high profile clients.
DuckDuckGo’s statement regarding the outage posted at 9:21am GMT
The message that greeted Bing Users in the early hours of Thursday
In various reports on X, users said that they were either greeted with a blank page or a 429 HTTP code error when they attempted to log on.
Users claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading but neither were producing search results when a query was typed.
