The Australian government has warned a global IT outage that threw major businesses including airports, banks, supermarkets and media outlets into chaos on Friday could still take “some time to resolve”.
The government activated a National Coordination Mechanism meeting of emergency authorities as well as representatives from the major supermarkets, banks, airlines and other key industries on Friday night to respond after Windows workstations were hit by the “blue screen of death”.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, said on Friday night the problem, which began about 3.30pm, was caused by a software update linked to the cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike. She said the company had attended the meeting and confirmed it had “issued a fix”, but it could still take “some time to resolve”.
The incident was not security related or a cyberattack but a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts, the CrowdStrike chief executive, George Kurtz, said a subsequent statement. .
The crowd-sourced website Downdetector has listed Telstra, Microsoft, Google, Foxtel, National Australia Bank, ABC, Uber, ANZ, and Bendigo Bank as suffering outages.
But Qantas, Virgin Australia, Jetstar, police across much of the country and the federal and NSW governments were hit, as well as point-of-sale machines at shops, including Coles and Woolworths.
Airports
Some flight screens at Sydney airport and other airports across the country went blank on Friday before returning at 5.30pm, with flights cancelled across the country and many passengers experiencing delays. Manual check-in was put in place for some airlines in Perth, with reports that people were struggling to get home from Bali.
Melbourne airport said in a post on X on Friday evening that Jetstar was “experiencing a significant outage” while Qantas and Virgin were “slowly processing passengers”. Jetstar’s international arm and the Singaporean carrier Scoot also experienced ongoing issues at Melbourne airport.
Sydney Airport flight displays have all BSOD'd. #microsoft #crowdstrike pic.twitter.com/ZL9QwGdi1a
— techAU (@techAU) July 19, 2024
A Virgin spokesperson said the company was aware of a “large-scale IT outage impacting multiple airlines and other businesses which is having an impact on our operations” before the situation became stable several hours later.
Banks
The Commonwealth Bank confirmed some PayID payment transactions were affected, and ANZ were also having trouble with some transfers.
“We know some customers have been unable to make PayID payments,” a Commonwealth Bank spokesperson said. “If you are unable to use PayID, you’re still able to make payments between your accounts or pay someone using their BSB and account number.”
At Westpac, there was “no impact to any Westpac customer-facing applications”, a spokesperson said.
Media outlets
Media outlets were also affected, with presenters on the ABC using their phones to read the news after the teleprompters went down and unable to show graphics, such as the weather map.
In Melbourne, Nine News journalists were forced to improvise the start of its 4pm bulletin amid problems with their prepared news packages.
Sky News had similar problems, with its services reduced at one stage because of the outage.
Supermarkets
Payment systems in stores were impacted, with customers at some Coles and Woolworths stores not able to tap their cards in-store.
One Liquorland employee said they were turning customers away because their system was down. “We are shut, we are telling all these people to go away.”
Local Coles has lowered its doors and with staff telling customers they’re closing. “You’ll hear all about it on the news tonight,” the store manager told a crowd outside. A trolley collector is telling people as they get out of their cars Coles is closed. pic.twitter.com/aHGXgMnYWY
— Molly Glassey (@GlasseyMolly) July 19, 2024
A Coles spokesperson said on Friday evening that the company was trying to get the system operational again.
“We are working quickly to get our systems back up and running and will provide further updates as we know more,” they said.
At Woolworths, “all stores across the country except for six are open and trading”, it said in a statement on Friday evening.
“In some cases, customers may find less registers available than normal so we’re grateful for their patience,” a spokesperson said.
“A small number of online orders have been unable to be fulfilled and those customers have been contacted.”
Health and emergency services
Some internal NSW and Victorian police systems had gone down but the triple-zero service remained operational nationwide.
The Australian National Relay Service confirmed it was working to restore services but said it was able to make triple-zero calls.
In Victoria, Western Health, which operates several hospitals, said it was impacted and had “reverted to the use of paper-based patient records”.
In Queensland, several private hospitals including Wesley Hospital and St Andrews Hospital in Brisbane were experiencing problems with their computers.
The systems were also down in Uniting Care and Ramsay Health Care, which operates around 20 sites around the state.
“We are assessing the impacts at a local level across our hospitals and health services network to understand which systems are affected and developing contingency plans for patients,” a Ramsay Health spokesperson said.
“At this stage, we do not know how long the outrage will last.”
Anthony Albanese said he understood Australians were “concerned about the outage that is unfolding globally and affecting a wide range of services”.
“My government is working closely with the national cyber security coordinator,” the prime minister said.
“There is no impact to critical infrastructure, government services or triple-0 services at this stage.”
