Sydney, July 19 – Major media groups, airports and businesses across Australia have borne the brunt as a global technical outage paralysed their services on Friday. Shortly after 3:00 p.m. local time, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) started a live blog, informing the public of “major IT outages at institutions across Australia and the world,” with the media outlet’s own computer systems also feeling the pain.
The identical issue was reported by multiple other media organisations, including SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9 and News Corp Australia.
While it then appeared unclear why “Blue Screen of Death” kept popping up on Windows computers, the technical outage swiftly extended to various sectors across Australia.
Australia’s flag carrier Qantas revealed that some of their flights have been delayed and works are underway to get customers on their way as quickly as possible, Xinhua news agency reported.
Airline operations and terminal services have been impacted at Sydney Airport. Despite contingency plans activated and additional staff deployed to terminals, the busiest airport in Australia didn’t rule out the possibility of delays overnight.
Melbourne Airport, another main gateway to Australia, said in a statement that the outage was “affecting each airline differently.”
According to the statement, those arriving on international flights are being processed normally, but passengers departing internationally on Jetstar and Scoot are experiencing ongoing issues.
As for domestic travels, Rex is unaffected, with Qantas and Virgin slowly processing passengers, whereas Jetstar is still grappling with a major outage.
At around 9:16 p.m. local time, Melbourne Airport updated that all Jetstar Airways flights had been canceled until 2:00 a.m. local time on Saturday.
Outages struck the payment systems of major supermarket chains, such as Woolworths and Coles. As self-service stations were forced to shut down, customers had to line up at attended check-outs.
Certain grocery stores opted to close after the IT outage, while others made it clear that they merely accepted transactions by cash. Banks, cab companies and other businesses also fell victim to the disruptions, with their computer systems unable to function.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement on Friday evening on the unfolding events, saying that the federal government is working closely with the National Cyber Security Coordinator.
“There is no impact to critical infrastructure, government services, or Triple-0 services at this stage. The National Coordination Mechanism has been activated and is meeting now,” Albanese noted.
Following the emergency meeting, Australian Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil confirmed to the public that the widespread outage is “a technical issue caused by a Crowdstrike update to its customers.”
“Crowdstrike attended the meeting and we can confirm there is no evidence that this is a cyber-security incident,” said the minister.
“The company has informed us that most issues should be resolved through the fix they have provided, but given the size and nature of this incident it may take some time to resolve,” she added.
Chief Strategy Officer at CyberCX Alastair MacGibbon told ABC that Australia felt the full force of the outage due to the time difference between it and the United States.
“Very early on people worked out that this was a CrowdStrike update that was pushed at night U.S. time,” said MacGibbon. “This was done when less computers are turned on in America.”
According to his analysis, the situation also worsened given the extensive use of CrowdStrike’s services.
“They’re a reputable company, and because they’re successful, it impacts many computers,” MacGibbon added.