Microsoft's outage appears to be global. Sarah Tew/CNET

People woke up to technological chaos on Friday morning as Microsoft suffered a massive, ongoing global IT outage, which is impacting airports, airlines, banks and broadcasters around the world. The problem has affected thousands of Windows PCs, which many companies and organizations rely on as part of their critical internet infrastructure. Perhaps most concerning of all, several states across the US have reported that their emergency 911 call centers have been hit.
Microsoft said on X that it was aware of an issue affecting people's ability to access 365 services late on Thursday. In an update issued around 4 a.m. ET/1 a.m. PT, when it said, "multiple services are continuing to see improvements in availability as our mitigation actions progress." The company didn't immediately respond to request for further comment.
The outage, which also took down the London Stock Exchange, has been linked to a faulty update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The company handles the security of many Windows PCs and services around the world. In a statement on Friday morning, Crowdstrike said the issue had been "identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed."

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