Developing: Tech Outage Strikes Banks, Airlines, Firms Worldwide… Most Serious It Outage the World Has Ever Seen’ Sparked Global Chaos Today

The ‘most serious IT outage the world has ever seen’ sparked global chaos today – with planes and trains halted, the NHS disrupted, shops closed, football teams unable to sell tickets and banks and TV channels knocked offline.

Officials have held an emergency COBRA meeting after a devastating technical fault caused Microsoft’s Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to immediately turn off at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh on the busiest day for British airports since Covid.

NHS England said patients should not attend GP appointments unless informed otherwise due to problems with the system used to schedule appointments, while train passengers have been told to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues across the entire network’.

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With more than a thousand flights cancelled globally, passengers were seen sleeping in passageways at Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed at terminals across Spain, and in Delhi staff set up a makeshift whiteboard to record departures.

Shops in Australia shut down or went cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.

Cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error that hit Microsoft 365 apps and operating systems and said a ‘fix has been deployed’. The American firm said it was caused by a ‘defect found in a single content update’ and insisted the issue ‘was not a security incident or cyberattack’.

Windows is the most used operating system in the world, meaning the outage is affecting almost every part of the global economy – with supermarkets and cafes, including Morrisons, Waitrose, B&Q and the bakery chain Gail’s, unable to take card payments. There have even been warnings workers may see a delay to their paychecks.

Technology experts have said the disruption is at the scale expected from Y2K or the ‘Millennium Bug’, a computer programming shortcut that was forecast to cause chaos as the year changed from 1999 to 2000 but never materialised.

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‘I don’t think it’s too early to call it: this will be the largest IT outage in history,’ said Troy Hunt, a respected security consultant, in a social media post. ‘This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.’

TV channels including Sky News and CBBC spent time off air this morning, and football clubs including Manchester United told fans they will have to delay the release of match tickets. Meanwhile, the Mercedes F1 team said it was working to fix any issues ahead of practice sessions for the Hungarian GP.