Australia and New Zealand cyber outage hits government, media and telcos
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A cash register showing a blue screen at a grocery store affected by a cyber outage in Sydney on July 19.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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SYDNEY - A cyber outage related to an issue at global cyber-security firm CrowdStrike and Microsoft hit media, retailers, banks, airlines and telecommunications companies across Australia and New Zealand on July 19.
Australia’s largest bank, Commonwealth Bank, said some customers had been unable to transfer money due to the service outage. National airline Qantas and Sydney Airport said planes were delayed but still flying.
Victorian state police said some internal systems had been hit by the outage, but emergency services were operating normally. The output of a number of media companies was also disrupted.
“Like a number of other organisations, global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems,” a spokesperson for telecoms firm Telstra said on July 19.
"The issue is causing some holdups for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience."
CrowdStrike ran a recorded phone message on July 19 when Reuters contacted its technical support saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft’s Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor, without mentioning Australia.
Chief executive of CrowdStrike George Kurtz on July 19 said in a post on social media platform X that the firm “is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”. Mr Kurtz, who is also the founder of CrowdStrike, added that the issue is not a result of a “security incident or cyber attack”.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he added.
There was no information to suggest the outage was a cyber security incident, the office of Australia’s national cyber-security coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X.
“I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” it said in the statement which did not mention CrowdStrike.
“Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies.”
A spokesperson for New Zealand’s Parliament said its computer systems had also been affected.
State broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a “major network outage”, without giving a reason.
In a pre-recorded message played on Sky News Australia as regular programming was disrupted, correspondent Tom Connell said the outage was not believed to be the result of a hack.
“Our computers, our systems are down, all the things that make Sky News run down and indeed for many other major companies around the country,” he said.
A Reuters reporter saw error messages on payment systems at grocery chain Harris Farm in Sydney on July 19. REUTERS
