Lingering effects of IT outage to last weeks: Australian Home Affairs

Canberra, July 21 – Disruptions linked to the CrowdStrike global IT outage will continue for several weeks, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said.

The Minister on Sunday warned that it could take up to two weeks for sectors affected by the outage to get back to normal, reports Xinhua news agency.

The Microsoft Windows outage, which was triggered by a software update deployed by cyber security firm CrowdStrike on Friday, caused major disruptions to banks, airlines and businesses around the world.

On Sunday, O’Neil convened a National Coordination Mechanism meeting, bringing together government agencies and representatives from affected industries to discuss the outage.

In a statement posted on social media after the meeting, she said it would be some time before all systems were fully operational.

“There has been a huge amount of work over this weekend to get the economy back up and running. However, it will take time until all affected sectors are completely back online,” she said.

“In some cases, we may see teething issues for one or two weeks. There is no impact on critical infrastructure or government services.”

Representatives from CrowdStrike told the meeting that they were close to rolling out an automatic fix for the issue, which O’Neil said would increase the speed at which systems are brought back online.

She urged Australians to be extremely cautious of scams and phishing attempts trying to capitalize on the outage.