How can one tech issue cause chaos across the globe?

A widespread computer outage that has grounded flights, forced TV stations off-air and left much of world's infrastructure not working appears to have been caused by a glitch in a single piece of software. One tech expert dubbed it the 'largest IT outage in history'.

Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike said a corrupted update file on Windows hosts was the cause of the meltdown, which has been described as the biggest IT outage the world has ever seen, and were rolling out a fix. The company, which provides security protection for cloud software including the Microsoft 365 platform, said the outage was not caused by a 'security incident or cyberattack'.

The fault left many computers using Microsoft software displaying the so-called 'blue screen of death' on Friday morning. The update appears to have been installed overnight - but left users unable to switch on their computers properly afterwards.

READ MORE: LIVE: Sky News, Ryanair, trains, banks and supermarkets hit by global IT outage amid Microsoft Windows issues

Toby Murray, associate professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, Australia, said a 'buggy' update to CrowdStrike's Falcon anti-virus software may have been the cause of the global outage.

"For example, if it detects that a computer is infected with malware that is causing the computer to communicate with an attacker, then Falcon could conceivably block that communication from occurring," he said. "If Falcon is suffering a malfunction then it could be causing a widespread outage for two reasons - one: Falcon is widely deployed on many computers, and two: because of Falcon’s privileged nature.

"Falcon is a bit like anti-virus software: it is regularly updated with