Airlines’ operations in Singapore, the United States and Australia have been disrupted due to a major global cyber outage affecting services.

The massive information technology (IT) outage, which began in the early hours of Friday, also affected banks and media outlets.

According to international media, several airports and airlines have reported issues with their IT systems, as the outages spread.

In the UK, Govia Thameslink Railway’s four brands – Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express, and Great Northern – reported widespread IT failures, impacting their services.

Australia’s Telstra Group, a telecommunications company, has also been reported to be facing disruption.

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Sky News was off air briefly in the UK due to the widespread outages, leaving viewers without access to its broadcast.

An on-screen message on Friday morning, apologising for the interruption, read, “We apologise for the interruption to this broadcast. We hope to restore the transmission of Sky News shortly.”

Flights are said to be grounded at Sydney airport, United Airlines has stopped flying, while the London Stock Exchange Group’s platform is reportedly experiencing interruptions.

In Germany, the Berlin airport reported issues with its IT systems, adding that delays experienced with check-ins “are due to a technical fault”.

Rail transportation was also impacted as UK firm, Govia Thameslink Railway, reported delays.

“We are currently experiencing widespread IT issues across our entire network,” the service said on social media.

In addition, Telstra Group, a telecommunications firm in Australia, reported service disruptions on its X account on Friday.

“Global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems. The issue is causing some hold ups for some of our customers and we thank you for your patience,” Telstra Group said.

Microsoft, in a statement, said a configuration change in a portion of “our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources” which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.

The tech giant said the issue “may be impacting” any user attempting to use various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

The services affected include PowerBI, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 admin center, and Microsoft Purview, the firm said.

“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.