‘Twisted way to say TGIF’: Global tech outage deeply disruptive in Australia, less so in Korea
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SINGAPORE/SYDNEY – Undergraduate student Gabriel was working at his part-time job when Microsoft Windows kept suddenly shutting down on him.
It took him a while to realise that he was part of a global technology outage on July 19, caused apparently by an error in an antivirus update run by CrowdStrike
“We ended up getting an early finish since there was nothing my team and I could do. It was a pretty twisted way to say TGIF,” said Gabriel, who is based in Melbourne, Australia. He wanted to identify himself only by his first name because he is not authorised by his employer to speak to the media.
TGIF is a contraction of the phrase “thank God it’s Friday”, commonly used to express the prevailing sentiment at the end of the work week.
But other than students in Britain, who were released early on their last day of the school term before the start of the long summer holidays, for many the outage brought little relief.
Manual boarding passes, limited prescriptions
Airports from Bangkok and Berlin to New Delhi and New York
“The Microsoft/CrowdStrike outage has taken down most airports in India. I got my first handwritten boarding pass today,” tweeted Mr Akshay Kothari, along with a photo of his boarding pass, which showed details of his flight from Hyderabad to Kolkata written by hand instead of printed.
British pharmacies struggled to fulfil patients’ prescriptions when they lost access to critical patient data and the computer networks controlling the supply of medications.
Supermarket operators from Hong Kong to Australia were forced to shut registers and could not fulfil some online orders, with the Woolworths chain in Australia shutting six outlets.
The unravelling chaos had to do with a defective update for CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor security software, which resulted in crashes of the Microsoft Windows operating system, leaving many users facing a dreaded “blue screen of death”.
Chaos Down Under
In Australia, one of the hardest-hit countries
Some petrol stations stopped functioning, including those in isolated rural areas. Australian television broadcasters were forced to cancel or suspend shows, particularly news broadcasts, since presenters could not access their teleprompters.
Trains were also affected, with some commuters left in the lurch when services were suspended.
“(Our) train driver just announced that we can’t continue our travel due to lost communications. Stuck halfway,” tweeted a passenger on a train run by V/Line, a rail operator in the state of Victoria.
With some experts warning that the disruptions could last for days, the authorities in Australia convened emergency meetings to address the outage but said it was not believed to have been caused by a hack or cyber attack.
Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator, Ms Michelle McGuinness, said in a tweet there was no evidence to suggest that the outage was due to a cyber-security incident.
However, the disruptions pointed to the perils and risks of relying on a single provider for vital technological services without the provision of alternatives.
South Korea relatively unscathed
Few disruptions seemed to have been reported in some countries, such as South Korea and China, which appeared not to rely as much on the affected platforms.
Major South Korean companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix were not affected, and industries such as motor vehicles, batteries, oil refineries and chemicals, steel, shipbuilding, commercial companies, defence and construction confirmed that there were no disruptions to their operations. According to Yonhap News, most South Korean companies have their own servers for security reasons.
Data from the South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT in 2023 showed 60 per cent of cloud services in South Korea were mainly on the unaffected Amazon Web Services platform, while the Microsoft cloud platform accounted for only 24 per cent.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters on July 19 that the government was working with the Australian Federal Police and the private sector to ensure that the outage did not pose security or privacy concerns.
“This is a very significant cyber event,” he said. “It’s not the first and it won’t be the last.”
Additional reporting by Jonathan Eyal in London, Wendy Teo in Seoul, Magdalene Fung in Hong Kong, Tan Hui Yee in Bangkok and Nirmala Ganapathy and Debarshi Dasgupta in New Delhi.
