Businesses including supermarkets, doctor surgeries, banks, airlines, train companies, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters, have been taken offline following a mass global outage.
A spokesperson for Waitrose said: “We were able to take card payments – but contactless payments were briefly unavailable this morning. Chip & PIN was available, as were cash payments. All payments back up and running as of this morning, thankfully. This only impacted Waitrose shops – no issues with online orders.”
GP surgeries have said they are unable to access patient records or book appointments due to the major global IT outage.
It is believed the issue is related to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and Microsoft – although it is unknown if it is the same issue affecting airports and train services across the globe.
Microsoft said on Friday morning that it was continuing to address the “lingering impact” of its 365 applications and services that are in a “degraded state” while Crowdstrike said in an automated message that it was aware of reports of crashes.
