Airlines, banking services, government offices, media and supermarkets, as well as the London Stock Exchange --- systems those operating on Windows across the globe --- experienced an outage, dubbed as the Blue Screen of Death, on Friday morning.

The outage has been reported to be caused by problems at the global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

Millions of users on Friday morning, while they tried to open their laptops or desktops or after they had the system working for a while experienced an unexpected shutdown or restart.

A message flashed on a blue screen with a sad emoji with notifications like, "Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer."

Blue Screen errors, also known as black screen errors or STOP code errors, can occur when a critical issue forces Windows to unexpectedly shut down or restart. You may encounter a message stating, "Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer".

Another common message read: “Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart. we're just collecting some info, and then we'll restart for you."

In some cases, the computers automatically restarted multiple times.

"We're investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services. more info posted in the admin centre under MO821132 and on https://msft.it/6019lRURc," read a post by Microsoft 365 Status. "We're working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion."

In India, Spicejet and Akasa Air reported facing technical issues that affected booking, check-in and flight updates.

"We're currently facing a technical issue in providing updates on flight disruptions. Our team is actively working to resolve this issue," Spicejet said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). "We regret for any inconvenience caused and will update you once the issue is resolved. Thank you for your patience and co-operation."

Akasa Air in a similar message said online services including booking, check-ins, and managing of booking services will be temporary available.

"Currently we are following manual check-in and boarding processes at the airports and hence request passengers with immediate travel plans to reach the airport early to check-in at our counters," they posted on X.

In Australia, one of the first countries to be hit, the ABC News 24 could not play the news packages. checkout systems crashed at the Woolworth supermarkers, even the police systems went down.

The Wall Street Journal reported that several flights were cancelled in the United States.