Microsoft‘s share price has plummeted by $10 each before rising again following a global IT outage which impacted the entire world.
The technical fault, which caused Windows software to suddenly shut down, grounded flights and knocked hospitals, GP surgeries, train services, banks, stock exchanges and TV channels offline.
Following the global outage, Microsoft which runs the Windows software has seen its share prices drop on Wall Street.
Yesterday evening a stock at Microsoft cost $441.59. However, by this morning when the global issues with the software became more apparent the share dropped to £432.94.
The drop was short-lived and the stock has since began to rise again but below the price yesterday evening.
This morning when the global issues with Microsoft became apparent the share dropped to £432.94
A screen in Madrid Airport affected by the global outage. The technical fault, which caused Windows software to suddenly shut down, grounded flights and knocked hospitals, GP surgeries, train services, banks, stock exchanges and TV channels offline
Huge queues at Gatwick Airport after a massive Microsoft outage affected services
Meanwhile Crowdstrike – the company responsible for the disruption – has seen an eye-watering $12.2bn wiped off its value.
This comes as experts fear the outage will impact services for days.
It was described by IT bosses today as a ‘digital pandemic affecting millions’, with others fearing the disruption will last long into the weekend.
Among those taking extra steps today was the Mercedes F1 team, which since 2019 has been an official partner of CrowdStrike, the US cyber security firm which admitted to being responsible for the error.
A team spokesperson said it was working to apply ‘the relevant fixes’ ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend.
It comes after a day of chaos which saw departure boards immediately turn off at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh on the busiest day for British air travel since before the Covid pandemic.
In a sign of the global impact of the IT failure, passengers were seen sleeping in passageways at Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed at terminals across Spain, and in Belfast and Delhi staff set up a whiteboard to record departures.
Shops in Australia shut down or went cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.
These maps show where Microsoft outages have been concentrated in the UK, the USA and Australia
A checkout worker in a Little Waitrose at Kings Cross Station told customers: ‘It is cash only at the moment. The card machines are not working’
AUSTRALIA: The ‘blue screen of death’ is seen at a supermarket in Brisbane after the outage
British train passengers have been warned to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues across the entire network’, while NHS England said patients should attend GP appointments unless told otherwise due to problems with the appointment and patient record system. There is no known problem with 999 services.
Microsoft confirmed it was investigating an ‘issue’ with its 365 apps and operating systems and said a resolution was ‘forthcoming’.
US cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error and said ‘fix has been deployed’. The firm said it was caused by a ‘defect found in a single content update’ and insisted the issue ‘was not a security incident or cyberattack’.
CrowdStrike shares opened 15% down at the start of trading today – wiping $12.5billion (£10.5bn) of the company’s value – while Microsoft also opened down.
Windows is the most used operating system in the world, meaning the outage is affecting almost every part of the global economy – with supermarkets and hospitality venues, including Morrisons, Waitrose, Wetherspoon and the bakery chain Gail’s, unable to take card payments. TV channels including Sky News and CBBC spent time off air this morning.
Around the world banks, supermarkets and other major institutions said computer issues were disrupting services.
Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at ISACA, a professional IT association, described the incident as a ‘digital pandemic’.
This graph shows just some of the companies that have been affected by the IT outage
Microsoft users around the world have taken to social media to express their confusion at their computers shutting down
He said: ‘When one service provider in the digital supply chain is affected, the whole chain can break, causing large-scale outages. This incident is a clear example of what could be termed a digital pandemic, a single point of failure impacting millions of lives globally.’
GPs have also been hit, with surgeries in Cumbria, Cheshire, Yorkshire and the West Midlands taking to social media to say their systems had been affected.
The issue has hit the EMIS system, which allows doctors to book appointments, view patient notes, order prescriptions and make referrals.
Speaking to MailOnline, a practice manager of a GP practice in Berkshire said: ‘We are completely dead in the water.
‘We can’t see any patients are systems are down. It’s not clinically safe to treat patients because we can’t see their notes.
‘Can’t give out prescriptions and even if we do hand write them the problem is also affecting the pharmacies. It’s affecting the whole area and hospitals are in an even worse situation.’
Microsoft has suggested to those affected by the error that they turn their machines off and on again – as many as 15 times – in order to resolve the error, reported 404 Media.
Microsoft have been contacted for comment.
Just two months ago Microsoft was hit with another major outage after Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, went down with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down.
According to reports the outage also impacted ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google’s dominance in the world of web searching, Bing’s API has numerous high profile clients.
In various reports on X, users said that they were either greeted with a blank page or a 429 HTTP code error when they attempted to log on.
Users claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading but neither were producing search results when a query was typed.