Nova’s Ricki-Lee, Tim and Joel broadcast live amid global CrowdStrike outage

Nova hosts Ricki-Lee, Tim and Joel found an old-school workaround to broadcast their drive show live amid the global outage, which caused chaos for most Aussie media outlets.

The global tech outage didn’t kill these radio stars.

Nova’s national drive show Ricki-Lee, Tim and Joel managed to go live on Sydney and Melbourne airwaves amid the chaos caused by the unprecedented CrowdStrike blackout, which continues to impact supermarkets, banks and airlines in Australia and around the world.

Computers began shutting down around 3pm Friday AEST, triggering the “blue screen of death” and bringing multiple major businesses to a screeching halt. The software company later revealed the issue was caused by a “defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.”

While a fix was deployed Friday night, it’s understood businesses will continue to be affected for days to come.

Commuters driving home from work were treated to an understandably amateur broadcast from Nova – one of the only FM stations to get a live drive show to the air – with Ricki-Lee Coulter taking to social media to show fans how they made it happen.

Nova’s Ricki-Lee, Tim and Joel drive show managed to go live amid the global Microsoft outage.

Operating from an Apple laptop, co-host Tim Blackwell was playing music from his personal Spotify account into manually patched in microphones, while fellow host Joel Creasey featured at various points via speaker phone.

The trio kept time via an analog clock positioned on an office chair.

Co-host Joel Creasey phoned in at various points.

The trusty analog clock.

“Welcome to Nova, the hacked edition. I think we’re on? It’s Friday afternoon, there’s been a little incident,” Blackwell began the show.

“My heart is racing so fast, this is so fun, I feel like I’m saving the world right now,” Coulter added, saying she felt like “Ben Affleck in Armageddon.”

“We can’t speak to anyone, we don’t have any ads, we’re in control of the music,” the pop singer continued.

On Instagram, the radio hosts claimed they were the “only Aussie FM drive show to go live during a worldwide outage.”

The network’s Group Programming Director Brendan Taylor said in a statement, “During the outage, Nova was able to keep the Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel show on air, one of the only Drive shows to maintain a live broadcast yesterday.

“This is all testament to our world class technology and production teams and the professionalism of our presenters.”

KIIS FM’s Will & Woody were on the airwaves, though they appeared to broadcast a pre-prepared show with live news updates.

2Day FM and Triple M also aired back-up recordings.

Ricki-Lee was taking song requests via Instagram.

The trio celebrated going live amid the outage.

Most Australian media outlets were impacted by the outage, including News Corp, publisher of this website, though operations continued as best as possible.

Channel 10’s The Project had a minor hiccup Friday night when the electronic autocue stopped working while host Waleed Aly was broadcasting.

“While [Donald] Trump is flying, a new low point for Joe Biden gathered serious momentum today as the man himself,” Aly began, before stopping himself upon realising he wasn’t making any sense.

“Sorry … What am I saying? Oh, this is what happens when the systems go down … This weird text sort of appears on the … Can we get a shot of a camera so you can see how the autocue works?”

The Project attempted to go on with the show amid tech bungles.

Network Ten earlier joked on their social media accounts they were having trouble during the IT blackout.

The Project attempted to go on with the show amid tech bungles.

Friday was a vibe for the media.

Meanwhile, it’s been revealed one of the key figures in the IT outage is an Australian multi-millionaire.

Mike Sentonas, from Melbourne, is worth an estimated $225 million and is the global president of CrowdStrike, one of the most prominent cybersecurity companies in the world.

CrowdStrike provides data protection software for its customers. However, it’s believed an update to one of its products – Falcon sensor – pushed out overnight in the US contained a “defect” — leading to global chaos.

Mr Sentonas joined the company in 2016 as vice president of technology strategy.

The company confirmed the outage was a result of a planned upgrade for Microsoft.

The shutdown hit multiple countries including New Zealand, Japan, India, the US and the United Kingdom.