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The Canberra Times
The Canberra Times
Steve Evans

Canberra airport, shops running smoothly amid scam warnings

Beware of scam calls after the huge collapse of computer systems on Friday, the government has warned.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil said people and businesses should be very wary of offers out of the blue to help people help to get their computer systems back to normal.

"We are hearing that some small businesses and some individuals are receiving emails from people who are pretending to be CrowdStrike or Microsoft," she told journalists.

She also asked Australians to "not take this out on the staff at your supermarkets".

"They're doing everything that they can to bring systems back online as fast as possible," she said.

She was speaking as the country got back to normal after the unprecedented global collapse of systems.

Canberra Airport was affected on Friday evening with a few cancellations but by Saturday services were leaving and landing on schedule.

The big shops at the Canberra Centre were not affected on Friday evening. Shoppers used credit and debit cards at Aldi and Coles, though some smaller outlets may have been hit. On Saturday, shoppers were back in force as usual.

Belconnen Mall was operating normally on Saturday.

Canberra Airport had returned to business as usual on Saturday after being impacted by cancellations on Friday night. Picture Shutterstock

Woolworths said all stores were open and trading as normal. A spokesperson said Saturdays were always busy but there was plenty of stock on the shelves.

The supermarket chain did reiterate the minister's hope customers would be tolerant and polite to staff if there were glitches.

"Thanks to all of our team members who have worked tirelessly overnight to ensure our stores could open to serve our customers," the Woolworths spokesperson said.

The country's cyber spy organisation, the Australian Signals Directorate, also warned people to beware of cyber hackers releasing malicious websites and code purporting to help fix the outage.

Ms O'Neill called Friday's event a "very serious incident for the Australian economy".

"What has happened here is an IT outage that has been caused by an error in an update provided by a company which provides cyber security software for most major economies around the world," she said.

In Canberra, both the police and the Emergency Services Agency said they had not been affected by the outages.

They had been worried some fire alarms in office and apartment blocks might not be communicating with their services but that concern had been lifted by midday Saturday. They were urging anyone whose alarm went off to call triple-0 but that advice is no longer in operation.

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