A massive Microsoft Windows outage has left millions of computers experiencing Blue Screen of Death errors, as well as worldwide communications issues.
The blackout has pulled Sky News of the air, as well as grounded flights for airlines around the world.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, has reported a sharp spike in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking sites and airline apps.
Users have reported problems across the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, India and Japan.
What is causing it?
So-called Blue Screen of Death errors (BSOD) have appeared on laptop and computer screens following a recent CrowdStrike cybersecurity update, according to reports.
"We're aware of a widespread issue causing BSOD errors on Windows machines across various sensor versions," a CrowdStrike spokesperson said in a help forum on its website.
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The outage appears to relate to CrowdStrike's Falcon cloud cybersecurity service.
The blue screen essentially forces laptops and computers to suddenly shut down and restart.
However, users say they are getting the screen several times back to back, shutting them out of their PC completely.
Microsoft and CrowdStrike engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.
In a statement on X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft 356 said it is "investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services".
It added: "We're working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expediate fashion."
Toby Murray, an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, said it is possible that today’s outage may have been caused by a buggy update to Falcon.
This is a breaking news story.