Australians warned to expect lingering issues after worldwide IT outage recovery

Australians have been warned to expect “teething issues” following a worldwide cyber crash which brought down computer systems and grounded planes across the country.

The outage struck just after 3pm (AEST) on Friday and hampered banking services, airport check-ins and supermarkets across the world, and forced laptops to shut down.

Checkouts at Coles in New Farm remained offline on Saturday morning following the CrowdStrike outage.Credit: Cameron Atfield

Cyber Security Minister Clare O’Neil said while the country was now in the “recovery phase” of responding to the issue, the outage was a “serious incident” for the Australian economy.

At a press conference in Melbourne on Saturday, O’Neil said the government’s priority was ensuring people could access the services they need, and it was too early to ascribe blame for the chaos.

“I’ve seen it reported that this is the biggest IT outage in world history, and that is absolutely possible. It’s certainly the largest [outage] in the time that I’ve been alive,” she said.

“This is a really significant incident that’s occurred here, and there will be a long run of discussion about what we’ve learned and who is ultimately responsible, but those are not questions for today.”

O’Neil said she could not provide an estimate on the number of businesses affected or the cost to the Australian economy.

The outage was caused by a fault in the “Falcon sensor” used by US-based cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike after a defective software update was launched. The company confirmed that the issue was not caused by a cyber hack.

The sensor is installed on many business computers to gather security data. The fault had a major impact on Microsoft systems worldwide.

CrowdStrike founder and CEO George Kurtz apologised in a statement on Saturday morning, and said the company would be transparent about steps they were taking to ensure this never happened again.

Emergency services were online on Saturday, with no interruption to triple-zero calls.

O’Neil said while most technical issues were resolved on Friday night, Australians would still notice some “teething issues” at places like supermarkets and airports on Saturday.

“Shelves are fully stocked. We don’t have any food shortages ... but some of the tellers and some of the checkouts may not be open in all the supermarkets around the country,” she said.

“We’ve seen our major airlines are back online, but there might be internal technical difficulties, for example, with baggage handler systems communicating with the front of the terminal.”

Jetstar was working through a backlog of cancelled flights, with check-in and baggage counters operating as normal, and Qantas and Virgin flights were unaffected, a Melbourne Airport spokesman said.

Jetstar passengers formed long queues to check in at Sydney Airport on Saturday, as the departures board showed the cancellation of four flights operated by the budget airline and two cancelled Virgin flights.

Nicole O’Reilly and sister Aoibhe arrived at the airport three hours early for their midday Jetstar flight to Hamilton Island after they were unable to check in online on Friday. The airline’s computer kiosks were not working.

“We came to the airport early because we weren’t sure what the queues would be like after last night,” O’Reilly said.

Jacklin Matti and Victor Yakubu were scheduled to depart on a 9.15am flight to Melbourne to attend a friend’s birthday celebrations, but were notified on Friday by the airport that their flight was cancelled.

Matti said she was initially unable to contact Jetstar, but the airline later offered the pair a different flight.

“We’re going to be a bit late for the party, but hopefully there’ll still be punch left by the time we get there,” she said.

Supermarkets were mostly trading as normal by Saturday morning, including for online orders, although Coles and Woolworths both said that some checkouts were not yet fully functional.

A spokesman for Coles said some bottle shops were still unable to open, but the majority of BWS stores and all Dan Murphy’s were trading as normal.

“Some checkouts continue to be affected by the global outage so we thank customers in advance for their patience and treating our team with respect,” a Woolworths spokesperson said.

“Following some disruption to a small number of orders last night, our online system is operating as normal with our team expected to pick up and deliver thousands of orders over the weekend.”

Coles said all supermarkets were open.

“Some registers may be temporarily unavailable while we fully recover. We are putting on additional team members to assist customers with their shopping, and we thank everyone for their patience,” the company said.

The federal government called a snap meeting on Friday night for emergency authorities and executives from Telstra, Optus, Coles, Woolworths, Qantas, and Virgin to respond to the chaos. The group met again on Saturday morning to discuss recovery efforts.

The Australian Signals Directorate’s cybersecurity centre said a number of malicious websites and unofficial code were being released “claiming to help entities recover” from the incident.

The directorate warned users to only take their information from official CrowdStrike sources.

“If someone has called you and he’s suggesting that they’re going to help you talk you through a reboot of your system, I would hang up the phone,” O’Neil said. “Don’t give any personal information and certainly don’t put in any bank details or money.”

Public transport services in Melbourne were running to the normal Saturday timetable, and Melbourne Airport was also recovering from Friday’s meltdown.

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