Australia has experienced a massive IT systems failure that has impacted banks, airports and supermarkets. Problems with the technology infrastructure caused significant disruption to the day-to-day operations of these institutions, causing major inconvenience to consumers and companies, Australian media reported.
Australia’s national cybersecurity coordinator said on Friday it was aware of a “large-scale technical failure” affecting multiple businesses and services across the country. The agency said in a statement:
“Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies. There is no information to suggest it is a cyber security incident. We continue to engage across key stakeholders.”
Pictures have emerged on social media in Australia showing blank flight information screens at Sydney Airport and non-working self-service checkouts at supermarket chains Woolworths and Coles. Sydney Airport said flights were arriving and departing but travellers should expect delays. It said in a post on X:
“We have activated our contingency plans and deployed additional staff to our terminals.”
Melbourne Airport said that check-in procedures for some airlines had been affected. It wrote in a post on X:
“Passengers flying with these airlines this afternoon are advised to allow a little extra time to check-in. Please check with your airline for flight updates.”
The disruption caused airlines and airports in the US, Spain, Berlin and other countries to suspend operations and cancel departures.
According to FlightAware, Frontier Airlines alone cancelled 131 flights and delayed another 223, accounting for nearly 30% of its total air traffic. British broadcaster Sky News said it was unable to broadcast and residents in the US state of Alaska were unable to call emergency services. Blue screens of death also paralysed hospitals, banks and stock exchanges in Britain, the US, Israel and other countries.
Turkish Airlines was forced to suspend flights due to a “major global outage.” There was also a “computer systems incident” at all airports in Spain, and several UK airports were forced to temporarily halt flights.
The disruptions also affected banks, utilities, media, telecom companies, mobile phone operators, internet and other organisations. Indian news channel Times Now reports that the global outage was caused by a “recent CrowdStrike update.”
Microsoft has confirmed that it has experienced an issue with Azure storage in the central US and assured that the cause of the outage has already been identified and work is underway to fix the problem.
