A catastrophic IT software outage has struck internationally, bringing services including banks and supermarkets to a standstill and disrupting access to communications.
Airports and news outlets were affected by the outage, as well as systems including Gmail, Amazon and Australia Post.
Triple-0 calls were not affected by the outage.
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The outage struck about 3pm, but could not be reported by most media outlets.
It was a “catastrophic” outage, tech expert Ming Johanson told 7NEWS.
“This is definitely one of the biggest outages that we’ve ever seen,” she said.
What’s effectively happened is there’s been a system update from a third party that had some infrastructure requirements and they’ve pretty much pushed out too many updates at once.
“I think they’ve not followed a few processes around this and it is a real problem and they really need to review their process of pushing updates out — certainly the volume in which they did, that’s caused this problem.
“There are some questions, definitely, to be asked once we’re in recovery.
“Microsoft takes up such a huge amount of all of our system infrastructure, it’s our core operating system and we’ve got such a huge reliance on lots of things within one ecosystem with Microsoft
“Not just with the operating system itself, but also our email exchange, also our file infrastructure, the way that we communicate.
“A lot of that happens with one singular system that’s sort of taken over everything.”
The outage will have lasting impacts and may mean Australians need to examine how our information is stored and verified, Johansen said.
“We are so reliant on our technology at the moment, so who knows where this is going to go?
“We’ve certainly never seen something quite as catastrophic as this, so I think there’s a lot of things we really need to think about in terms of backups and redundancies, but also cybersecurity and the risks that come about from this.”
Microsoft acknowledged issues with its services as early as 9.41am AEST on Friday.
“We’re investigating an issue impacting users’ ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services,” Microsoft 365 Status said on X (formerly known as Twitter).
“We’re working on rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact in a more expedient fashion.”
It said it is “observing a positive trend in service availability” as it continues to redirect traffic.
Travellers at airports were reportedly told to google their flight information while systems were down.
“A global technical outage has impacted some airline operations and terminal services,” a Sydney Airport spokesperson said.
“Flights are currently arriving and departing however there may be some delays throughout the evening.
“We have activated our contingency plans with our airline partners and deployed additional staff to our terminals to assist passengers.
“Anyone travelling today should leave plenty of time to come to the airport and check with their airline regarding the status of their flight.”
While Australian flights were not grounded, US travellers were unable to depart due to the communication issue.
Flights from several major US airlines including Delta, United and American Airlines have been affected.
Not a cyberattack
The Department of Home Affairs is not treating the incident as a cyberattack.
“I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said.
“Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies.”
US cybersecurity technology company CrowdStrike has said the crash is related to its Falcon Sensor, which its website says, “blocks attacks on your systems”.