Major mass IT outages are hitting industries all over the world, with airlines, broadcasters, banks and supermarkets affected.

Sky News has not been able to broadcast live, its executive chairman says, and major airlines have suspended operations.

KLM states on X that flight handling is “impossible”, while American Airlines, the world’s biggest by passenger numbers, says no flights are being allowed to take off, and that it is in contact with all flights that are currently in the air.

It tells the BBC that the IT problems are because of a “technical issue with Crowdstrike that is impacting multiple carriers”.

That’s echoed by Denmark’s Center for Cyber ​​Security (CFCS), a branch of the Defense Intelligence Service, which states on X that “CFCS is aware that there are currently several issues with certain Windows clients. It is likely due to an error in an update of the Crowdstrike Falcon security program.”

It says it is “following the situation closely”.

Meanwhile, Microsoft says it is taking mitigation action, but that the cause of the outage hasn’t been confirmed. Updates on improvements can be found here.

In Denmark, several airlines at Copenhagen and Billund airports are affected, according to DR.

According to a statement from Copenhagen Airport, the problems mean that travellers must be checked in manually, which is generating queues.

SAS has confirmed it “has technical problems which affect its booking engine”, which are causing problems with online ticket-booking, reports Reuters.

The airline is “fully operational, but we expect delays”, said a spokesman.

At Billund Airport, senior manager of the press department Dan Prangsgaard tells Ritzau that “it takes a little longer because some have to be checked in manually, but the operation seems to be running very well,”

“It is the IT systems of some of the airlines that have problems,” he says.

The following airlines have so far announced that they have been hit: SAS, Air France, Lufthansa, Ryanair, Delta Airlines,  JetStar, Jeju Air, Qantas, HK Express, Spring Japan, American Airlines, KLM.

Frederiksborg fire and rescue, which operates emergency services in Egedal, Frederikssund, Furesø, Halsnæs and Hillerød, has reported that automatic fire alarms are being set off at the national emergency call centre, making it difficult to discern real from automatic alerts.

In case of a fire, they advise instead calling the police on 1-1-2 “in order not to delay our response”.

The national police service states on X that it has not been affected.

The popular Swedish online stockbroker Nordnet has also been affected, and “due to technical problems with Windows”, users may experience “problems related to transfers and creations”, they write on their website.

The national train operator DSB’s website dsb.dk and all sub-pages are down “but the rest is running fine”, the company tells DR.

The trains are running as they should, however, and the DSB app is still functional at the time of writing.

“It appears that the so-called ‘Blue Screen of Death’ that computers are suffering means that each one needs to get ‘hands on keyboards treatment’,” reports Joe Tidy, BBC’s cyber correspondent.

“That is, it appears to be not something that can be fixed with a central command from an IT administrator in a firm’s HQ. They will need to go and reboot each and every computer affected.”

“If it is indeed a Crowdstrike issue that could be a monumental task. Crowdstrike reported having nearly 24,000 customers in its last earnings.”

“Each customer is a large organisation, so the number of individual end points could be enormous.”