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.”
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.
Broadcasters, including the ABC and Channel Ten, which suffered technical issues due to the outage were back online on Saturday. In an email to staff, Ten’s head of news, Martin White, said staff stepped up in the most trying circumstances.
“We went from writing a ‘rundown’ on a piece of paper … to typing into the one working laptop to go on set … to putting together a series of the most comprehensive and dynamic bulletins you will ever see,” he said.
“We put our own tech struggles aside, for the sake of our viewers. And that is what makes for great journalism.”
Related: Full recovery from ‘largest IT outage in history’ could take weeks
After the second meeting of the national coordination mechanism of Australian governments that was activated following the outage, the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, said the Australian economy was in a recovery phase from the outage, with most systems back online.
“For most customer-facing systems, most companies that use CrowdStrike are fully operational, but we are seeing some teething issues,” she told reporters in Melbourne. O’Neil said most in the country would go about their weekend not noticing any issues, but said people should be patient and not take out any frustration on frontline staff.
O’Neil acknowledged there needed to be an examination of why so many organisations were reliant on one US-based company like CrowdStrike.
“I think there is a conversation here about what needs to be done when we have so many companies around the world who are reliant on one particular provider of technology,” she said. “But I would also say that as with my cyber responsibilities, as I’ve often said to Australians, it is not feasible or possible for any government around the world to say that we’re never going to have it outages and we’re never going to have cyber-attacks.”
O’Neil said it was too early to say the cost to the Australian economy or discuss whether CrowdStrike should pay compensation.
“There will be a long run of discussions about what we’ve learned and who is ultimately culpable. Those are not questions for today.”
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.”
CrowdStrike was approached for comment.
