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A major outage affecting Windows workstations, on Friday, paralysed global businesses including banks, airlines, telecom companies, TV and radio broadcasters, and supermarkets, The Guardian reported.

Users experienced problems with Microsoft 365 and services, and a blue screen with an error message popped up on computer terminals, forcing businesses to temporarily shut operations. Technology experts are investigating the matter.

Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike said that the issue is related to the Falcon Sensor product and that engineers identified the issue as a content deployment problem and had reverted the changes.

Indian airline Akasa Air said on X that due to infrastructure issues with its service provider, some of its online services, including booking, check-in and manage booking services will be temporarily unavailable.

“Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence request passengers with immediate travel plans to reach the airport early to check-in at our counters,” the carrier said.

Microsoft said users may not be able to access its 365 cloud-based app services. The company is “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,” it said.

The preliminary root cause was a configuration change in a portion of its Azure backend workloads, which caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.

Reuters reported that top US carriers American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines grounded flights on Friday citing communication issues. It was not immediately known if the flights were grounded due to a Microsoft cloud outage as the software giant said that it resolved the issues related to its cloud services.

(This is a developing story)