SAUDI EXPATRIATES

Worldwide, reports of disruptions have started flooding in, with the UK's Sky News being dark for hours on Friday morning.

- Global users of Microsoft's Azure and Office 365 services have also been affected by the outage. The first reports of the outage were made at 18.00 ET on Thursday, or midnight CET on Friday.

- "Investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services" was the message that the Big Tech company sent out in an X post.

- "We still expect that users will continue to see gradual relief as we continue fixing the issue," the company said. Most Viewed : Saudi Arabia bans Tattos Tanning at Barbershops

- Several airlines, including Qantas in Australia and Frontier and Sun Country Airlines in the US, have grounded their flights.

- There was an influx of reports on the outage monitoring website Downdetector.com on Friday morning from European users of Ryanair's app and website who were unable to check in for their flights.

- "Experiencing disruption" as a result of a "globe 3rd party IT outage" was the airline's official explanation in an X post.

- Berlin Brandenberg Airport is one of several European airports that have announced IT problems, warning passengers to anticipate check-in delays. A computer glitch made the departure boards inoperable at Edinburgh Airport in the United Kingdom.

- Airports in India, Japan, and New Zealand have all reported problems with flights.

- Aircraft are currently being denied landing privileges at Zurich, the biggest airport in Switzerland.

- Grocery stores in the United Kingdom that took credit card payments included Morrison's, Waitrose, and Aldi. Read : 60 Million visitors visited Saudi Arabia in 6 months

- Other businesses have also felt the effects, including pharmacies, doctors offices, and hospitals, two German hospitals, in Luebeck and Kiel, reportedly had to cancel non-urgent surgeries due to problems collecting patients' medical records.

- An antivirus software update that went wrong at worldwide security firm Crowdstrike is reportedly to blame for the IT disruption.

- Computers and mobile phones, among other devices, have been "bricked," or rendered useless, as a result of software corruption.

- Reddit users on the Crowdstrike subreddit (r/crowdstrike) have posted what appears to be a corporate alert sent out only to customers, implying that the Falcon Sensor is to blame.

- Customers are reporting frequent Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors and being unable to restart their devices, which the business acknowledges in the communiqué. Most Viewed : Saudi Arabia discovers huge Oil and Gas fields

- Reports of crashes on Windows hosts associated with the Falcon Sensor have been brought to the attention of CrowdStrike. It claims that hosts may see a bugcheckblue screen error associated with the Falcon Sensor as a symptom.

- Crowdstrike has been personally contacted by Euronews Next for confirmation.

- "We don't yet know the cause of these outages, but it appears this is linked to Microsoft and Crowdstrike, which would explain disruption across sectors and globally," said Lauren Wills-Dixon, a data privacy expert at the UK-based law firm Gordons, in an interview with Euronews Next, after Friday's outage.

- "Outages can be created by several causes and Microsoft has named a ‘technical issue’ rather than a cyber incident," according to microsoft.

- "We’ll likely find out more as the hours progress, but this shows just how reliant we are on certain tech, how much trust organizations put in them and their security practices, and also the chaos that downtime can cause" . — The European News Channel Recommend : New retirement age in Saudi Arabia

- In the meanwhile, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) verified that the Kingdom's banking systems, national payment networks, and its own systems were unaffected by the technical outage to which numerous organizations across the globe fell victim today

- A worldwide technical issue has disrupted some airline systems at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, and the airport has notified that efforts are underway to resolve the issue. If you want to know the most up-to-date information about your flight schedule, Jeddah Airport says you should phone your airline.

- Several international airlines computer systems were down at Dammam's King Fahd International Airport. Several airlines using King Fahd International Airport were affected by this disruption. Consequently, in conjunction with aviation companies, a strategy for business continuity was put into motion by utilizing alternate systems. Dammam Airport emphasized the significance of contacting airlines in advance of travel to verify flight status.

The worldwide disruptions in the aviation industry have not had any impact on Saudi Airlines operations, the company said, because its flight system is running well. Saudi Airlines has announced that passengers would receive flight status updates through email and text message. Join Saudi Expatriates WhatsApp channel