Man Utd among sports clubs and broadcasters affected by global IT outage

Sports clubs and broadcasters are among those affected by a worldwide IT outage.

Manchester United said they were postponing the release of tickets due to the outage and that the club’s website was down until the issue was resolved.

Sky Sports News was unable to broadcast live and was directing viewers to its app and its website.

Overnight, Microsoft confirmed it was investigating an issue with its services and apps, with the tech giant’s service health website warning of “service degradation” that meant users may not be able to access many of the company’s most popular services, used by millions of business and people around the world.

EFL clubs including Blackburn, Bolton, Bradford, Chesterfield, Huddersfield, Leyton Orient, Lincoln, Plymouth, Preston, Rotherham and Walsall were among the first to report issues.

Scottish top-flight clubs Hearts and Hibernian also posted to say they had been affected by the outage.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike later said it was “actively working” to fix a “defect” in an update for Microsoft Windows users which sparked the outage, the company’s chief executive has said.

George Kurtz said Mac and Linux users were not impacted by the fault and it was “not a security incident or cyber attack”.