Global chaos ensued following what’s been dubbed the “the largest IT outage in history.”

Trains and planes were halted, and the UK’s NHS experienced serious disruptions, with many stores unable to sell tickets and banks and TV stations interrupted.

The disruption caused Microsoft Windows computers to shut down, making it impossible for airports to run smoothly.

NHS England said that patients should not attend GP appointments unless told otherwise due to issues affecting the system used to schedule appointments.

Outages caused disruptions at stores in Australia, while the US saw emergency service lines go down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Ohio, reports the Daily Mail.

CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, has taken responsibility for the error that affected Microsoft’s family of apps and operating systems. They say that a fix has been “deployed” and that the outages were caused by a “defect found in a single content update.”

“It could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover,” George Kurtz, president and CEO of CrowdStrike, told NBC's “Today” show this morning.

Kurtz added that CrowdStrike was “deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this.”

“Many of the customers are rebooting the system, and it’s coming up, and it’ll be operational because we fixed it on our end,” he said. “We’re just trying to sort out where the negative interaction was,” he added.

Kurtz has insisted that the outage was not a “security incident or cyberattack.”

Security consultant Troy Hunt said in a social media post that he believes this will be “the largest IT outage in history” and even compared the outage to “what we were all worried about Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”

Alberta Health Services (AHS) confirmed evening that a network outage occurred earlier in the day, causing widespread disruptions and postponements to non-urgent surgeries and other procedures.

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In Israel, at least 15 major hospitals have been impacted by the recent cyberattack, according to local media reports.

While most medical centres have either returned to normal operations or switched to manual operations to continue providing care, the disruption has been significant.

Authorities and cybersecurity teams are actively working to resolve the situation and restore full functionality to the health-care services.

Over half of Fortune 500 companies used CrowdStrike software, reports Reuters.