Massive IT Outage Hits Australia's Airlines, Banks And Businesses

Several businesses in Australia were hit as Microsoft Windows users across the globe faced network outage related to an update of its cybersecurity software.

The U.S-based company's Crowdstrike Falcon was installed on Windows as a safeguard against cyber breaches, including thefts. Earlier this week, Crowdstrike had launched an update of its security software. On restarting after the software update, computer screens were displaying the Blue Screen of Death error messages.

The global outage affected businesses in Australia, with servers, banks and government agencies shutting down on Friday afternoon, ABC News reported.

Australia's National Cybersecurity coordinator Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness posted on X about the outage.

Australian cybersecurity company CyberCX said it was aware of the outage and that it will support the customers who were affected.

"We understand that this has been caused by an issue affecting organizations who have installed CrowdStrike Falcon in their IT environments," a CyberCX spokesperson said. "CrowdStrike is a global cybersecurity company who provide detection and monitoring tools to cyber and IT teams. At this time, CyberCX is actively tracking the situation and are awaiting information detailing scope and recovery. "We will continue to support affected customers as this incident evolves."

Melbourne airport informed passengers to delay their check-ins as it was experiencing a "global technology issue," The Guardian reported.

Several people were locked out of their workstations, following the outage.

NAB, Westpac, ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, Bendigo Bank and Suncorp stated their functioning was impacted by the outage.

Meanwhile, power operation company SA Power Networks said the outage affected them and efforts were on to resolve the problem. In Victoria, Powercor said its internal corporate IT system was impacted, but the grid remained unaffected.

Crowdstrike clarified that their engineers had identified the problem was linked to content deployment.

George Kurtz, the founder and chief executive of the firm, said "it could be some time for some systems" to be back to normal, and added they would not "just automatically recover."