Worldwide Microsoft Outage Hits Flights, Markets, Stock Exchange, Broadcasters 

A massive Microsoft outage has disrupted multiple sectors across the world, including India, Australia, Germany, the United States, the UK, and other countries on Friday, affecting many critical services. Airlines, banks, stock exchanges, payment systems, telecommunication and emergency services, health systems, and broadcasters were among those disrupted due to the outage.

The outage is possibly due to the failure of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity platform that provides security solutions for Microsoft Windows.

In Australia, the outage affected banks, telecoms, media outlets and airlines. A “large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon," Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator said. In United States emergency 911 services were disrupted in many parts of the country. Non-emergency call centres were also not working due to the outage.

Britain's Sky News, one of the country's major television news channels, said they were unable to broadcast. A health booking system used by doctors in England has gone offline. Services at the London Stock Exchange were disrupted. In India traders reported disruptions in their operations. News agency Associated Press also faced service disruption in news delivery.

AIRLINE DISRUPTIONS

Berlin airport has halted all flights due to a technical fault. The airport operator said in a post on social media that check-ins were delayed due to the error. Major US airlines, including American Airlines, Delta and United, reportedly grounded all flights. Authorities in Spain reported a "computer incident" at all its airports, while Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned passengers of potential disruptions which it said would affect “all airlines operating across the Network". Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, one of Europe's busiest hubs was affected by the global outage. Turkish Airlines was also experiencing problems with ticketing, check-in, and reservation processes due to a global technical issue in information systems.

In India, the outage caused widespread flight delays across airports. The outage hit booking and check-in services of several airlines, including IndiGo, Akasa Airlines and SpiceJet.

Millions of Windows users worldwide are experiencing the Blue Screen of Death that is causing computers to shut down or restart. In some cases, computers are restarting repeatedly, affecting services as users lose unsaved data and critical time.

As the systems shut down, a message on the screen says, "Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're just collecting some error info, and then we'll restart for you."

Blue Screen errors, also known as black screen errors or STOP code errors, can occur when a critical issue forces Windows to unexpectedly shut down or restart. Microsoft 365 has said in a statement that they are investigating the issue.