Tom, what an extraordinary situation. We're getting a sense of the scale because I'm getting updates all the time on different organizations coming forward saying, Terrible IT problems is causing a certain amount of chaos. That's right. What do we know about it?

Well, you might be able to see on the screens, in our newsroom, they're blue.Technical...Or black. Cyber folks even have an acronym for this. It's the Blue Screen of Death, a B-S-O-D. It's a feared phenomenon because it means something's gone seriously wrong with the software that provides the services for your business, whatever they might be. As we understand, this is a problem affecting Microsoft systems. They are obviously a globally dominant software provider. What appears to be coming through, although there's still a lot of confusion about this at the moment, CrowdStrike, which is a company that provides cyber security protection for Microsoft users, we're installing an update across networks It appears that there's some glitch occurred as a result of that, which has caused systems to go down. As I say, we're still getting details on that to confirm it, but all the indications are at the moment, this is not a cyber attack of any sense. It appears to be a bit of routine maintenance that's gone badly wrong. It seems to be gone badly wrong in multiple areas around the globe, almost simultaneously. The East Coast of the US had a problem overnight, but it now seems to be, as you were saying, Australia took Airports in Japan are having disruption as well.

Other parts of Asia, Australia, including their broadcast, as you were saying. It just illustrates the vulnerability that we have when lots of people are working on common systems that, to be fair, we don't notice. They're pretty complicated things. It's almost surprising these don't happen more often, but we are seeing a massive global outage and disruption to Microsoft.

How much are the companies themselves saying about this? Are Microsoft saying anything?

So far, all I'm seeing is updates from technical engineers online talking about it. I don't think we've had any formal comment from these companies, but as soon as I get that, I will bring that to you. We had a statement from CrowdStrike, I believe, which I haven't got with me at the second. I can bring it to you in a minute. But yes, that appears to be the situation at the moment, and it's causing time for people to recover. Interestingly, at airports, it seems the disruption is not because flights are trouble in any way. It's the display screen systems, for example, at Edinburgh Airport, and then check in, scanning bags and check-in processes. It's the front-of-house stuff that's gone down and the admin processes that's impacted that.

People don't have to worry about the safety, I guess. It's just the practicality.

I think that is clear, as we know in things like aviation, there is a lot more redundancy in those systems. Also, if it's not safe to fly, they just won't. That's the situation there. But as I understand it, flights are not disrupted except because of getting people on and off aircraft.

Okay. As you say, the information coming in all the time, of course, and trains also affected. But it's not just transport. There are also problems in the city of London as well. Let's cross live to our business presenter, Ian King, now. We can bring him in. Hi there, Ian. Great to see you in person there. We've made the technology work there. What is the impact of this global IT outage there?

Well, we've had some issues on the London Stock Exchange. Very early this morning, in fact, overnight, while the Asian markets were still open, there were issues with Workplace, which is a platform, a news and data service, provided by LSEG, the London Stock Exchange Group, a parent of the exchange. They told users that they were having some issues, their users reported issues, and that certainly affected the ability of some market participants to obtain quotes and details on the foreign exchange markets. We then were around seven o'clock our time, a message appeared on the London Stock Exchange website in which they said that they were having issues with RNA US, which is the Regulatory News Service. It's the medium by which companies update the market with, for example, trading statements, result statements, news about directors and boardroom changes and so on. It's an absolute vital piece of the plumbing for the equity market here in London. The exchange said that they were having issues, technical issues, that were preventing them from getting news and information up there. That doesn't appear, however, to have been an issue in terms of getting pricing data out. The The equity market opened as usual at eight o'clock.

The FTSE 100 opened some two-thirds of 1% lower, in common with exchanges right across Europe. There's been a sell-off right across Europe. At the moment, probably pretty You're only talking about, as I say, half to two-thirds of 1% lower for most of the main equity indices here, the DAX in Germany, the CACAeront in France, the Mubin Milan. They're all down by, roughly the same amount. Trading appears to have got underway now, but what still appears to be a stumbling block is the ability of the exchange to get regulatory news service announcements up and running.

Can you tell us anything about CrowdStrike? This company that we understand was launching an antivirus update. No confirmation of what has happened, but can you tell us anything about that company, Ian?

Yeah, sure. This is a very big company indeed, Anna. It's listed on the Nasdaq in the United States. It's got a stock market valuation of around 83 US$2 billion. Essentially, it's a provider of cyber security services. It claims to be able to detect incoming attacks and enable the systems of clients to be able to brace themselves against these attacks. The piece of The software in question is something called Falcon Sensor, apparently, and there was an upgrade to this service going on overnight. It appears in particular to have hit Microsoft. It spread to Azure, which is Microsoft's main cloud service, and that is why you've had these widespread outages. Now, Microsoft is saying that Azure is now back up and running, but it does appear that this particular software, this Falcon sensor made by CrowdStrike, appears to be at the heart of all this. Ironically, quite a techy relationship over recent months between CrowdStrike and Microsoft. Crowdstrike, on a number of occasions, has raised questions about the resilience of Microsoft systems, which is all deeply ironic in view of the fact that its own software upgrade appears to be at the heart of all these problems now.