Businesses worldwide experience major outage, causing Microsoft and CrowdStrike shares to fall in premarket trading.

After an update caused a major outage, impacting businesses worldwide, the cybersecurity firm's shares plummeted on Friday.

The stock price of the company that develops software for managing security in IT systems fell by 20% during premarket trading in the U.S.

Microsoft reported a 2.5% decline in premarket trading, citing issues with its Azure cloud services and Microsoft 365 suite of apps.

An ongoing major IT outage caused numerous websites to go down on Friday morning, halted air travel, and paused TV broadcasting.

On Friday, CrowdStrike experienced a significant outage due to a problem with an update affecting its Falcon Sensor product, which is used to prevent cyber attacks through cloud technology. The company is currently working to reverse the update worldwide.

CrowdStrike has acknowledged reports of Windows host crashes linked to the Falcon Sensor, as stated in a recorded phone message to NBC News.

The update problem at CrowdStrike led to Windows systems worldwide being affected, with laptops displaying the "blue screen of death" error message.

Microsoft reported that its cloud services were mostly restored after experiencing an outage affecting its cloud apps in the U.S. on Friday. However, it is unclear whether this outage was related to CrowdStrike's update.

- CNBC's Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report

This is a breaking news story. Please refresh for updates.