Air travel hit by global cyber outage.

By Andrew Mills, Elena Rodriguez, and Lisa Barrington

EDINBURGH/MADRID/SEOUL (Reuters) -Air passengers around the world faced delays, cancellations and problems checking in as airports and airlines were caught up in a massive IT outage that also affected industries ranging from banks to media companies.

Out of over 110,000 scheduled commercial flights on Friday, 1,390 have been cancelled globally so far and more are expected to be called off, according to data from global aviation analytics firm Cirium.

In Edinburgh, a Reuters witness said boarding pass scanners carried a “server offline message”, with the airport saying passengers shouldn’t travel to the airport without checking their flight status online first.

Elsewhere, airports and airlines advised customers to arrive earlier than normal for flights. Analysts said the outage was likely tied to a glitch in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) software used globally.

Microsoft said users might be unable to access various Office 365 apps and services due to a “configuration change in a portion of our Azure-backed workloads”.

Hong Kong International Airport said a Microsoft outage was affecting several airlines and it had switched to manual check-in, but flight operations had not been affected. Singapore’s Changi airport also said check-ins were being handled manually.

Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike said it was working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Microsoft Windows hosts.

CHAOS

The outage sparked chaos for passengers from Madrid to New Delhi, with European air traffic control body Eurocontrol saying it was unclear how many flights had been impacted on the continent.