A massive global Microsoft outage has hammered Australian businesses including Woolworths, Qantas, the ABC and Foxtel, 7-Eleven – with computers around the country repeatedly crashing and displaying the ‘blue screen of death’.
The country was struck by an unprecedented cyber event at about 3pm on Friday, with at least 48 Australian services suffering outages, according to the Down Detector website on Friday afternoon.
Massive queues formed as checkouts failed at Woolworths supermarkets, Bunnings and airport departure boards failed prompting airline staff to advise customers to ‘Google’ when their flights left.
Financial services include Bendigo Bank, NAB, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ, Bank Australia, St George, Adelaide Bank, Me Bank, Bank of Queensland and Visa have been impacted, according to Down Detector.
Other services affected include MyGov, NBN, Centrelink, ASX, and Australia Post, along with a number of social media entertainment services including Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, X, Xbox, Google Cloud, Open AI, Reddit, Nine, Foxtel, and the ABC.
Vodafone, Aussie Broadband, iiNet, and Opticomm were among the telecommunications companies impacted by the outage.
Courts around the nation were also forced to close their doors after 3pm, when systems completely shut down.
CrowdStrike promises to ‘provide cloud workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.’
The National Cyber Security Coordinator informed users the outage was not due to a hack.
It said: ‘There is no information to suggest it is a cyber security incident.
‘Our current information is this outage related to a technical issue with a third-party software plarform employed by affected companies.’
A message on the CrowdStrike support page read: ‘CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.
‘Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.
