Major services back online after CrowdStrike fail chaos but ‘massive logistic issue’ remains

Queensland’s airlines, retailers and supermarkets have mostly restored their services after Friday’s catastrophic IT outage but there it could be days or weeks until other affected businesses return to normal, an expert says.

Queensland’s airlines, retailers and supermarkets have mostly restored their systems following Friday’s CrowdStrike outage, but other affected businesses now face the “massive logistic issue” of individually rebooting employee computers in-person which could take days or weeks, an expert warns.

Some Coles Group liquor stores – Liquorland, Vintage Cellars and First Choice – remained closed on Sunday as their systems were still down, while Brisbane Airport confirmed 43 inbound and outbound flights were cancelled on Friday and Saturday due to the IT issue.

A Queensland-based crisis management expert said the fact that customers and travellers were “transported back to the 1970s” on Friday night should be a “final call to action” for businesses to have back up plans in place, particularly after last year’s Optus outage.

Huge crowds after the delays to flights at Brisbane Airport. Picture: Richard Walker

At Brisbane Airport, the outage threw check-in systems for Jetstar into chaos from around 3.30pm on Friday, leaving passengers stranded.

“Forty-three flights to and from Brisbane were cancelled on Friday and Saturday due to the IT issue,” a Brisbane Airport Corporation spokesman said.

“It did not prevent aircraft from taking off or landing at Brisbane Airport at any stage, with travel continuing normally for most passengers.

“It did impact check-in procedures for some airlines. Those that were impacted moved across to backup systems.

“Most were able to transition very quickly. As Jetstar reported, it took until Saturday to resolve all IT issues.”

Woolworths check-outs were “sporadically” shutting down on Friday. Picture: X

Woolworths in Newstead’s Gasworks experienced check-outs “sporadically” shutting down on Friday night, while check-outs at Coles in New Farm were offline into Saturday morning.

All Coles supermarkets were open and trading as usual on Sunday with registers and online orders back to normal operation.

“All Liquorland, Vintage Cellars and First Choice liquor stores are open and trading, except for a small number which will re-open as soon as systems are restored,” a Coles Group spokeswoman said, but would not say whether any affected liquor stores were in Queensland.

A Woolworths Group spokesman confirmed on Sunday that all of their stores were open and operating as normal.

Caxton Street Development Association president Sarosh Mehta said none of the Caxton Street businesses were affected over the weekend – Suncorp Stadium hosted the Queensland Reds match against Wales on Friday night.

Caxton Street Development Association president and Casablanca bar owner Sarosh Mehta said businesses on the busy Brisbane street escaped the chaos. Picture: Claudia Baxter

Simon Petie, managing director of Brisbane-based Escalate Consulting, has been advising Australian businesses affected by the Crowdstrike outage in recent days.

He said a lot of big businesses were affected, rather than small family-run businesses, because they have the ability to afford “expensive” Crowdstrike cyber security.

“Crowdstrike is one of best cybersecurity providers in the market … obviously it’s not good that they pushed out a bug [in a software update], but their ability to still deliver their core service is maintained,” Mr Petie said.

“We’re lucky that this occurred on a Friday afternoon really, when so many businesses were closing and going home. There are many other businesses that were probably affected, but we’ll never know because they were able to respond over the weekend while closed.”

The infamous “blue screen of death” after the Microsoft Crowdstrike outage. Picture: Supplied

Mr Petie said while the outage was obvious for many, because they were greeted by “the blue screen of death” error message, other businesses didn’t know because their websites could still be accessed by customers, but they weren’t processing orders or payments.

“Some businesses have been able to respond very quickly, but others have to physically reboot or rebuild their systems, which involves every single employee taking their computer to their IT team to get it restarted in the right way,” he said.

“This is a massive logistic task, particularly given how common working from home is at the moment.”

Mr Petie said that while technology is great for improved efficiency and streamlining processes, businesses needed to have a failsafe.

“The advice we’re giving is for businesses to understand what is broken, identify what is the most important part of that, and focus their efforts and people on what they can do to work around it or recover it,” he said.

“In the efforts to be more efficient, people are increasingly being taken out of processes – for example in supermarkets. But businesses need to have an in-person back up in place or another process to enable them to still deliver their core business if this happens again.”

There have been no estimations so far on how much the Crowdstrike outage affected the Queensland economy, but Business NSW CEO Daniel Hunger said “the expected loss in economic output for NSW might well exceed $200m”.