The meltdown caused by the massive Microsoft outage has been described as a "digital pandemic affecting millions" by an IT expert.

       The outage, which is still not resolved, has impacted a wide range of sectors, from payroll to airports, from supermarkets to banks as well as the NHS.

       And there are fears the impact on major institutions and global disruption of services may have repercussions on the worldwide economy.

       Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at a professional IT association called ISACA, told the MailOnline: "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 globally."

       CrowdStrike, the US cyber security firm which admitted to being responsible for the error, said Mac and Linux hosts haven't been impacted and that the issue "has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed".

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