IT outages are impacting businesses and institutions across Australia including news outlets, banks, supermarkets, airports and telecommunications companies.
Home affairs minister Clare O’Neil said it was “a technical issue, caused by a to its customers.
“They have issued a fix for this, allowing affected companies and organisations to reboot their systems without the problem.
O’Neil said the company informed the government most issues should be resolved through the fix they have provided, “but given the size and nature of this incident it may take some time to resolve.”
Windows users experienced outages globally, which CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said was caused by “a defect found in a single content update” and was not a security incident or cyberattack.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website,” Kurtz wrote on X.
In a voice message the company said it was relating to its .
SBS News has contacted CrowdStrike for comment.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said there is no impact to critical infrastructure, government services or Triple-0 services.
Flight screens at Sydney Airport and other airports across the country were blank for some time with passengers being warned of delays.
While they started working again about 5.30pm, many passengers were still unable to board flights with Jetstar reportedly experiencing ongoing problems with their systems.
Melbourne airport was experiencing delays with passengers unable to check in. Source: SBS News
Flights across the country are being cancelled as a result.
A Virgin Australia spokesperson said some of its flights were likely to be cancelled and others would be delayed.
“We are working to resolve any delays and get our guests on their way as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson said.
SBS News understands an emergency meeting was held and those invited included major supermarket and retail chains, telcos and internet providers, energy and water representatives, banking, transport, logistics and finance representatives, airlines, and state and territory representatives.
O’Neil confirmed the government had met with CrowdStrike.
Real-time problem and outage monitoring site Downdetector showed several organisations including Commonwealth Bank and Australia Post experiencing disruptions.
In the US, Delta, United and American Airlines flights were grounded due to communications issues and 911 emergency calls were down in some states.
Airports around the world, including Tokyo, New Delhi, Amsterdam, Berlin and several Spanish airports reporting problems with their systems and delays.
Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, warned passengers of potential disruptions which it said would affect “all airlines operating across the network,” though it did not specify the nature of the disruptions.
In the UK, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple reports from medical officials on X said, train operators TransPennine Express and Govia Thameslink Railway were affected, and Sky News, one of the country’s major news broadcasters was off air for a number of hours, apologising for being unable to transmit live.
Some Woolworths outlets were closed due to the outage affecting their systems. Source: Supplied
Victoria Police said they are currently able to receive and dispatch calls from Triple-0 Victoria. “There are some internal application systems affected by the national outage, these are not impacting our ability to dispatch or respond to incidents”, a spokesperson said.
In a statement to SBS News, Optus said, “At this early stage it does not appear that Optus is impacted, however our IT team are closely monitoring the situation and will maintain a heightened vigilance.” A previous version of this article stated that Optus was affected by the outage.
A spokesperson for Woolworths told SBS News: “All stores across the country except for six are open and trading.”
“A small number of online orders have been unable to be fulfilled and those customers have been contacted.”
A Coles spokesperson said: “We are affected by a global technical issue which is disrupting some of our systems in our supermarkets and liquor stores. We are working quickly to get our systems back up and running and will provide further updates as we know more.”
Professor of cybersecurity at Monash University Nigel Phair said while it is too early to know for sure, the major disruptions appear “non-malicious.”
Banks have been impacted by the outage. Source: SBS News
“Normally you’d think it is a malicious hack, it appears to be an outage or a glitch with the company itself, so non-malicious,” he said.
“There could be major ramifications for cybersecurity, a lot of major organisations rely on CrowdStrike,” he said.
“When a large company like CrowdStrike goes down, they all do.”
– With additional reporting by Reuters and Australian Associated Press.
