Microsoft IT outage: Australian airlines, banks and supermarkets begin return to normal operations
Supermarkets, banks, airlines and industries across Australia are slowly recovering on Saturday morning from the massive global Windows outage caused by a CrowdStrike software update gone wrong, with experts warning it could take weeks to resolve.
On Friday morning, the CEO of the Texas-based cybersecurity company, George Kurtz, apologised for the outage, and said it was not a cyber-attack, but a software update issue on its cloud-based cybersecurity platform Falcon for Microsoft Windows. It had since been fixed.
However, because the error effectively disabled systems across the globe, landing them on the blue screen of death, it requires manual intervention to fix each system, rather than simply broadcasting out a new update to resolve the error.
This means IT support staff in businesses across the globe will need to implement the fix one computer at a time, in person and not remotely, experts have said.
As of Saturday morning, both Coles and Woolworths indicated they were open, but some checkouts may still be closed. Guardian Australia observed at one Woolworths about one-third of the self-checkouts were displaying the blue screen errors.
“All our stores are open today and trading with both cash and card. Saturdays are a busy shopping day and we have plenty of stock on hand,” a Woolworths spokesperson said. “Some checkouts continue to be affected by the global outage so we thank customers in advance for their patience and treating our team with respect.
“Following some disruption to a small number of orders last night, our online system is operating as normal with our team expected to pick and deliver thousands of orders over the weekend.”
A Coles spokesperson said supermarkets were open, but indicated some liquor stores may delay being opened as they recover.
“Some registers may be temporarily unavailable while we fully recover. We are putting on additional team members to assist customers with their shopping, and we thank everyone for their patience,” the spokesperson said.
“Many Liquorland, Vintage Cellars and First Choice Liquor stores will also be trading. All our remaining liquor stores will re-open as soon as systems are restored.”
Sydney and Melbourne airports reported being up and running on Saturday morning, but indicated some airlines may have delays.
“The global technology issue affected check-in procedures for some airlines at Melbourne Airport last night, however most passengers were able to depart,” Melbourne airport posted on X.
“This morning, all airlines are online and can check in passengers. There may be an increase in passenger congestion today in our terminals as airlines process some delayed passengers from last night.”
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Sydney airport warned of knock-on impacts from the previous night’s delays.
Qantas is understood to be back to business as usual, and no cancellations were reported on Saturday morning as a result of the outage. Jetstar said its IT systems are back up and running and the vast majority of flights are planned to operate today as scheduled, but there may be some impacts to flights as a result of cancellations on Friday.
Bendigo Bank said on Saturday morning it was restoring its systems after the outage and ebanking was now available but there may be delays in some transactions. ATMs were unaffected. The Commonwealth Bank said all of its services were available on Saturday morning.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, is expected to front media on Saturday morning following a meeting of the national coordination mechanism.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre warned on Saturday that a number malicious websites and “unofficial code” were being released claiming to help businesses recover from the outage, and the centre said it “strongly encourages all consumers to source their technical information and updates from official CrowdStrike sources only”.
In a new update on Saturday, Kurtz said he sincerely apologised for the outage, and CrowdStrike “understands the gravity and impact of the situation”. The company has pledged to provide support for those affected, and continuous updates.
“Nothing is more important to me than the trust and confidence that our customers and partners have put into CrowdStrike,” he said. “As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.”