Businesses including banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters, and supermarkets have been taken offline following a mass global outage, Paralel.Az reports citing SKY News.

Major US airlines including American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines have been grounded, while Berlin airport said it has halted all flights until 10am local time (8am GMT), due to a technical fault.

It comes as Microsoft said it was continuing to address the "lingering impact" of its 365 applications and services that are in a "degraded state".

The outage appears to be affecting Windows PCs globally, including Sky News in the UK which was not able to broadcast live TV on Friday morning.

Users on the subreddit for cyber security firm Crowdstrike reported issues in India, the United States and New Zealand.

While users in Australia began reporting issues early on Friday, stating they had been locked out of their workstations.