HOW ON EARTH DID 'DIGITAL PANDEMIC PARALYSE' THE WORLD?

AN IT meltdown costing "many billions" paralysed the world yesterday, leading to the cancellation of trains, flights and hospital appointments.

- Robert Kellaway

The mayhem also hit banks, shops and TV channels as the "digital pandemic" took down system after system globally.

Experts fear the crash, caused by a software update that made Windows freeze and revert to a "blue screen of death", will continue to affect services for days.

Whitehall officials held a Cobra crisis meeting to discuss the "most serious IT outage the world has seen".

No10 said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his Cabinet were being kept updated.

A spokesman added: "The Government is working closely the respective sectors with and industries." Cabinet Minister Pat McFadden added: "Cobra officials met this morning. The Prime Minister has been kept informed.

"We've had a major global IT outage causing huge inconvenience around the world, particularly for people travelling, for media organisations and for some parts of the health care system."

Pressed on what the Government can do, he replied: "Make sure that a fix is put in place and the inconvenience that is being felt comes to an end as soon as possible." Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at ISACA, a professional IT association, described what happened as a "digital pandemic".

He said: "When one service provider in the digital supply chain is affected, the whole chain can break, causing large-scale outages.

"This incident is a clear example of what could be termed a digital pandemic, a single point of failure impacting millions of lives." One of Britain's leading cyber-security experts warned that the economic hit from the global outage "could run into billions" of pounds.

Professor Alan Woodward, from Surrey University, said it was difficult to estimate the precise cost but added: "I fear the disruption will spread over days unless they can magically come up with a way of updating the software without the PC booting properly."