A Chief Technology Officer at an AI company has claimed the worldwide Microsoft IT issue is down to '40-year-old' 'out of date' technology.

Earlier today, businesses and users who use Microsoft faced major outages in the UK and worldwide, with laptops and systems not working.

Train stations and airports were also widely affected.

Nitish Mutha, Genie AI CTO and Co-founder said: “Microsoft Tools like Word are 40+ years old, so major outages are going to happen. There's a huge reliance on this technology, and a lot of people working in software development fear that it's out of date"

“Just take the legal profession as an example, we’ve seen the proportion of lawyers working on non-Windows machines rise from 3% in 2018 to only 6% in 2022. We definitely expect that to speed up after today.

“As we go forward, we need more companies moving away from being overly reliant on Windows.

"Only then can we be sure to avoid a digital pandemic like this from just one single point of failure.”

Train ticket machines also ceased functioning earlier as IT outages caused widespread trouble in the transport sector.

Pictures posted from stations show the machines with the dreaded "blue screen of death" Windows users have been experiencing this morning.

Train service information website National Rail Enquiries warned passengers about “widespread IT issues across the entire network”.

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Microsoft is aware of the outage issue

Microsoft has confirmed it was aware of and fixing issues with its cloud platform, Azure. Still, many cybersecurity experts have reported the potential source of the issue as global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which provides cyber attack monitoring and protection to many major businesses.

Experts have said a flawed update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor software could be the source of the problem.

In a statement on social media, CrowdStrike said the global IT outage was “not a security incident or cyberattack”, adding: “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed”.

In a statement, Microsoft said a resolution for Windows devices was “forthcoming”.

It said: “We are aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third party software platform. We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming.”