Major airlines, media organizations, businesses and police forces around the world are currently being affected by a massive information technology glitch caused by a problem with Microsoft cloud computing services early Friday, writes NBC NEWS.

Flights have been grounded in several countries and stores and broadcasters in several countries went offline as the outage affected Windows PCs.

Major carriers, including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, all issued ground stops Friday morning citing communications issues. Delta has ordered a “global ground stop”, said Rep. Eric Swalwell, a member of the House subcommittee on cybersecurity.

In Europe, Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport said there would be delays to passenger check-ins “because of a technical fault,” and Aena, which manages 46 airports in Spain, said “an incident in the computer system” could cause delays. Sydney Airport, one of Australia’s largest, said there would be delays.

Paris’ airport authority said in a statement that while its systems were not affected ahead of next week’s Olympic Games opening ceremony, “this situation has an impact on the operations of airlines at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly airports: delays in check-in, delays and temporary suspension of some flights”, according to The Associated Press.

Train operators in the United Kingdom also blamed IT outages for cancellations Friday morning and the London Stock Exchange blamed a “3rd party global technical issue” for stopping its regulatory news service posting any new items.

Microsoft said the problem with its Azure Service and Microsoft 365 apps, including services such as the videoconferencing app Teams, was fixed early Friday, but companies across the U.S. and Europe were still reporting problems. The company said “a small subset of services is still experiencing residual impact.”

An update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to the outages, the company told NBC. In a post on X, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said that the outages were due to a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”. He added that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack” and that “the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed”.