Banks, airlines and businesses around the world have been impacted by an IT outage at Microsoft.

In the UK, both Gatwick and Heathrow said that they had been impacted by the glitch, with some passengers experiencing delays whilst checking in and passing through security. Several railway companies, including Southern and Thameslink, also reported "widespread IT issues" across their entire networks.

Meanwhile, the executive chair of Sky News announced that the broadcaster was unable to broadcast live TV on Friday morning as a result of the outage.

The issue has been linked to a security update of CrowdStrike's Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution, which has impacted Microsoft’s services.

CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity firm with a cloud-native platform designed to protect endpoints, cloud workloads, identities and data.

The company told National Technology News that it is actively working with customers impacted by a "defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts", adding that the issue has been isolated and a fix has been implemented.

Microsoft described the root cause of the glitch as a "configuration change" to a portion of its Azure backend workloads. This caused interruption between storage and compute resources, resulting in connectivity failures that affected its Microsoft 365 services.

Omer Grossman, chief information officer at identity security company CyberArk, said that the outage will be one of the "most significant" cyber issues of 2024.

"CrowdStrike’s platform approach, which relies on a single agent focused on detection, might seem good at first glance, but as we can see, it can create significant issues,” said Al Lakhani, chief executive of cyber firm IDEE. “For instance, agents require installation and maintenance of software on multiple different OSes, adding layers of complexity and potential points of failure."

He warned that this means that agents can become a single point of failure, as a bad update can compromise the entire network, as seen with the SolarWinds attack.

National Technology News has reached out to Microsoft for further comment.

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