17 of the funniest global IT outage memes

A major outage has knocked millions offline, and is predicted to be one of the "largest IT outages in history." Inevitably, X/Twitter did what X does best: Memes.

Supermarkets, pubs, banks, airports and other businesses have been affected, with cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt saying: "The financial impact of this is already hard to fathom."

On Thursday night (18 July), Microsoft said it was investigating an issue after the tech giant warned of "service degradation" which meant some of the company's popular services would be inaccessible.

In a post on its website, Crowdstrike wrote: "Crowdstrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows related to the Falcon Sensor."

Workers have since shared their experience with Indy100, with one customer service specialist at a breakdown company explaining how the outage has "affected the whole company and the customers".

"We couldn't log any breakdowns or dispatch any drivers to live breakdowns, everything just stopped for a while," they said.

One retail worker said they've been unable to process transactions all morning – and still awaiting an update.

Meanwhile, workers across the globe are reaping the benefits from the outage, and sharing their TGIF outage celebrations in the form of memes online.

Some aren't best-pleased that the outage missed them...

Others are elated...

One X user came up with a food for thought...

Just in time for the heatwave...

Liz Truss memes were at the ready...

Some put themselves in the engineers' shoes...

Many more celebrated the rare occurrence...

Others sent big love to Microsoft...

A Microsoft spokesperson said: "Earlier today, a CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally. We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery."

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.