Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.

Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage. 

Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps. 

On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.

Online, users reported problems as far as Australia, New Zealand, India and Japan, with the UK likely to be heavily impacted as during Friday’s rush hour. 

Troy Hunt, a cyber security researcher, said in a post on X that “something super weird happening right now” with individuals around the world complaining their Windows computers were suddenly showing the “blue screen of death” and entering recovery mode.

Cyber security engineers pointed to a problem with CrowdStrike, a piece of antivirus software, which appeared to be causing computers to crash.

Senad Arun, founder of cyber research company Imperum, described the incident as “CrowdStrike Doom’s Day”. 

In a post on its website, CrowdStrike said: “CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows related to the Falcon Sensor.”

Travel chaos is sweeping the nation after the major tech outage impacting Microsoft software.

Gatwick Express is warning of delays: