A mass Microsoft outage has sparked chaos around the world - grounding flights and knocking TV channels, airports and banks offline.

The IT fault has caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to suddenly turn off at airports and causing Sky News to go off air.

US cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error, as they report on their website they are 'working on it'.

Sky News viewers were left with a static message on their TVs apologising for the 'disruption' to the service at 6am when broadcasting was meant to begin. It read: 'We apologise for the interuption to this broadcast. We hope to get things restored

Microsoft users around the world have taken to social media to express their frustration and confusion at their computers also shutting down.   

Sky Sports Presenter Jacquie Beltrao has posted on X saying: 'We're obviously not on air - we're trying @SkyNews Breakfast.'

This has also lead to travel chaos as passengers attempting to board flights have been unable to check in due to the technical issues.

American Airlines was forced to ground its flights this morning due to a communication issue, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's status page.

Low-cost carriers Frontier Airlines, a unit of Frontier Group Holdings, Frontier said earlier that a 'major Microsoft technical outage' hit its operations temporarily, while SunCountry said a third-party vendor affected its booking and check-in facilities, without naming the company.

'The Allegiant website is currently unavailable due to the Microsoft Azure issue,' Nevada-based Allegiant said in a statement to CNN.

A message on the CrowdStrike support page read: 'CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.

'Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.

'Status updates will be posted below as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.'

Sky News and 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. 

Allegiant and SunCountry had reported outages that affected operations.