Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike update causes major outage affecting businesses around the world

An update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike led to a major outage on Friday, the company told NBC, which impacted businesses globally.

CrowdStrike said it is now in the process of rolling back the update that caused the issue.

The confirmation came after widespread reports of technical issues across the world.

Microsoft said earlier on Friday that its cloud services had been mostly restored after it suffered an outage affecting its cloud apps in the U.S. It is not clear whether this outage was linked to CrowdStrike's update.

However, separately, the update issue at CrowdStrike appears to have directly affected Windows systems around the world, with laptops showing an error screen known as the "blue screen of death".

"CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor," CrowdStrike said in a recorded phone message.

Airlines, broadcasters, telecom firms and banks were among the many businesses that reported issues Friday, although it was not immediately clear what was causing each issue.

The London Stock Exchange said technical issues with its RNS news service were being investigated and Sky News, owned by CNBC parent company Comcast, was temporarily off air on Friday morning.

Meanwhile, airports around the world have reported delays as a result of technical faults and some planes have been grounded. Spain's airport authority AENA warned travelers to expect delays on Friday due to an "incident in the computer system," and U.K. airline Ryanair said it was experiencing disruption as a result of a third-party IT outage. It advised passengers to arrive at the airport at least three hours before their scheduled departure time.

Australian telecom firm Telstra said global issues affecting CrowdStrike