The vast majority of corporate IT worldwide is struggling on Friday morning, with things as mundane as point-of-purchase, and as complex as flight management not working because of a bad Windows security patch by security firm CrowdStrike.
An unknown number of Apple Pay terminals are affected by the Microsoft outage worldwide
While the failure is confined to Windows systems, it's significantly worse than previous Microsoft outages, because of the scale. American Airlines, Delta, and United, each grounded all aircraft, according to BBC News, TV stations including MTV, VH1, CMT, Sky News, and ABC News Australia went off air.
What's directly affecting Apple users is that there are now reports of supermarkets around the world having problems accepting Apple Pay and other contactless payments. This will be because they are using Windows-based terminals, but it's not clear either how widespread this issue is, nor why it isn't affecting all users.
The outage was caused by a software update by security firm Crowdstrike. The company has issued a brief statement saying that it was one issue in an update, and that "this is not a security incident or cyberattack."
"CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts," continues the statement. "Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted."
"The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed," says the company.
Crowdstrike has not given a timescale for when the fix will be adequately rolled out worldwide. At present, the issue is continuing, and at time of writing, Apple Pay has been seeing a spike in outages, presumably because of it.