International delivery firm ParcelHero has warned that a global IT outage at Microsoft, which has impacted retailers, travel and airlines, could have serious knock-on effects for the supply chain.

The glitch has been linked to a security update of CrowdStrike's Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution, which has affected Microsoft’s services.

On Friday morning several UK retailers, including Morrisons and Gail’s, experienced issues with their card readers.

Gatwick and Heathrow airports were also affected by the issues, with some passengers experiencing delays whilst checking in and passing through security.

According to aviation analytics company Cirium, around the world over 1,000 flights were cancelled on Friday morning.

Meanwhile, several British railway companies, including Southern and Thameslink, reported "widespread IT issues" across their entire networks.

International ports have also been impacted by the outage, with Poland’s largest container terminal, the Baltic Hub in Gdansk, asking companies to stop sending containers to the port.

Parcelhero’s head of consumer research, David Jinks warned that delayed flights and issues with IT systems at airports will impact airfreight.

"Not only will slots for dedicated airfreight flights be disrupted, but many international goods and packages are transported not only in specially designed cargo planes but also in the cargo holds of passenger aircraft," continued Jinks.

He said that delayed and out-of-position containers are "never good", pointing to the global shortages during the Suez Canal blockage in 2021.

"Time will tell the extent of disruption to international trade and industry caused by the global IT issue," continued Jinks.

CrowdStrike told Retail Systems that it is actively working with customers impacted by a "defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts", adding that the issue has been isolated and a fix has been implemented.

Microsoft described the root cause of the glitch as a "configuration change" to a portion of its Azure backend workloads. This caused interruption between storage and compute resources, resulting in connectivity failures that affected its Microsoft 365 services.

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