Airlines were grounded, network broadcasts went off their air and banks said their systems were disrupted as a major glitch affected computers globally, hitting the United States and Australia particularly hard.

In Japan, few companies were affected. ANA said it was operating normally, and the departure board at Narita Airport indicated that few flights were canceled. Japan Exchange Group, which owns the Tokyo Stock Exchange, said it was unaffected.

Online banking services of Japan major financial institutions were working, as were Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services, according to users.

Scattered problems were identified by some companies in Japan late Friday afternoon.

West Japan Railway (JR West) said travelers are unable to use a service that shows where trains are running.

Universal Studios Japan said via X that ticket sales were taking longer than usual owing to a software problem.

Jetstar Japan said that it had an issue with its domestic check-in system from about 1:40 p.m. at airports in Japan and had to start manually checking in passengers. It said that about 20 flights were canceled as a result.

JAL issued a statement online saying that reservations, purchases, reservation confirmations, reservation changes and reservation cancellations could not be carried out online for domestic and international flights.

In other parts of the world, the situation was far more dire.

Three large U.S. carriers — United, American Airlines and Delta — said that they ordered a global ground stop, with flights prohibited from taking off and only flights already airborne allowed to continue to their destination.

In Australia, Jetstar and Virgin Australia were grounded, while Telstra was reporting outages. National Australia Bank and ANZ were reporting access issues.

The glitch was blamed both on a Microsoft cloud configuration error and a problem with a CrowdStrike update causing Microsoft computers to crash. Microsoft confirmed that it was dealing with issues related to its Azure platform.