A widespread Microsoft outage is affecting Australia’s supermarkets, banks, telecommunications companies and more.

The ongoing widespread outage is reportedly related to US-based cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike. Its ‘Falcon sensor’ is installed on many business computers to gather security data.

“CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon sensor,” the company said in a statement on its website.

“Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon sensor. Our engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.

“Status updates will be posted below [on the Microsoft website] as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.”

There’s no evidence to suggest the mass outage is a hack or cybersecurity incident, according to National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness.

“I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” McGuinness said in a statement on X.

“Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies.