Businesses across the globe have been disrupted as a result of a series of technical glitches in Microsoft's systems.
According to reports, airlines, banks and several other businesses relying on Microsoft cloud infrastructure have not been able to operate in several countries, especially in the US and Asia.
On social media, employees from across the world have shared how they have been unable to work as their Windows systems refused to power up. Images of blue screens showing "your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart" dot the social media as people struggle to power up their computers.
However, checks by Nairametrics show that this has not impacted businesses in Nigeria yet as Microsoft services are still working fine in the country as of the time of filing this report.
Affected business
Bloomberg on Friday reported that McDonald's Corp., United Airlines Holdings Inc., and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) Group were among the major companies to disclose a variety of issues with communications to customer service.
"KLM said it was suspending most flights because of a global computer outage. They were the most prominent of a plethora of corporations from Japan to India and the US to report glitches with their operations. It was unclear what triggered the issues, which coincided with Microsoft's disruptions," the report stated.
It added that several newspapers have also reported at least some of the problems stemmed from CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. cybersecurity software. Australia's AGL Energy Ltd. said in a post on X it was currently experiencing system issues due to a CrowdStrike outage.
What they are saying
According to Bloomberg, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company was looking into the situation, while Crowdstrike representatives were not immediately available for comment outside normal business hours, and calls to their main number in Japan went unanswered.
"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 said in its latest status update.
The first glitches emerged in the US late on Thursday, blamed on a failure of Microsoft services including Azure and 365. Denver-based Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings Inc., grounded flights for over two hours. The airline lifted a nationwide pause on departures and started the process of resuming flights from 11 p.m. New York time.
The LSE Group, which operates the London Stock Exchange, said it's experiencing a global technical issue preventing news from being published.
In Asia, Japanese users began reporting glitches with services including Microsoft 365 - the company's internet-based office software suite - in the afternoon. Airlines at Mumbai, Narita, Singapore and Hong Kong airports reverted to manually checking in passengers.
The latest failures came right after Microsoft said it had resolved an Azure cloud services outage. The company's status pages had earlier showed Azure and Microsoft 365 experienced problems for several hours.
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