Thousands of businesses across Australia and the rest of the world are recovering after a massive IT outage caused chaos on Friday afternoon. But what exactly caused the outage, and is it likely to happen again?
“We’re aware of an issue with Windows 365 Cloud PCs caused by a recent update to CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor software,” Microsoft said in a statement on X on Friday.
What caused the Microsoft outage?
Massive disruptions that wreaked havoc on everything from radio and television, to banks and grocery stores after cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike pushed out a faulty content update on Windows servers. Servers running on Mac and Linux systems were not impacted by the outage.
CrowdStrike — an American-based cybersecurity firm that offers a range of cloud-based security services to 538 of the Fortune 1000 companies — launched the new update to its Falcon software on Friday, which caused a malfunction that disabled software worldwide. Ironically, the software is designed to protect against disruptions and crashes.
“This system was sent an update and that update had a software bug in it and it caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system,” CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz told the US Today Show.
“We identified this very quickly and remediated the issue, and as systems come back online, as they’re rebooted, they’re coming up and they’re working and now we are working with each and every customer to make sure we can bring them back online.
“But that was the extent of the issue in terms of a bug that was related to our update.”
If that wasn’t enough, Microsoft’s own Azure cloud services also faced a major outage, causing even further issues for businesses. The two outages were unrelated, so I guess it was just a bad day for Microsoft.
Was it a cyberattack?
The issue that prompted a blue screen of death for millions of users across the country was *not* the result of a cyberattack or hack — so you don’t have to worry about an ongoing threat to your security.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” Kurtz wrote on X. “We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.”
Kurtz added that “customers remain fully protected”, while apologising for the “inconvenience and disruption”.
Australian cybersecurity leader Alastair MacGibbon told the ABC that the issue wasn’t “malicious”.
“This is all about communication. This is about just reassuring the public that this doesn’t appear to be a malicious act,” MacGibbon said.
“Of course, in slower time, it would be to try to understand how you could build systems to reduce the likelihood of this happening again.
“You wouldn’t be calling this a near miss. It’s certainly a hit, but it’s a hit that wasn’t malicious. And as a consequence, we’ll learn more from it and there’ll be plenty of raking over the coals by government agencies and corporates all around the world.”
Which businesses were affected?
At this point it’s probably easier to list the businesses that weren’t affected by the outage.
Low-cost airline Jetstar cancelled all Australia and New Zealand flights as a result of the outage, with flights only resuming at 2am on Saturday morning. Things should be largely back to normal today, but brace for delays if you’re heading to the airport.
Jetstar said flights on Saturday are “are currently planned to operate as scheduled. Please proceed to the airport as usual.”
“There may be a small number of flights impacted due to operational reasons. If your flight is impacted, we will communicate directly to you using the contact details on your booking,” a statement on the Jetstar website read.
The outage also hit the airwaves, causing Triple J host Abby Butler to manually play the station’s theme music out of her phone.
Self-serve checkouts and eftpos facilities at supermarkets and petrol stations also caused chaos, with some forced to close — while others went cash-only.
Many major banks including Commbank and ANZ also had to close, which made getting cash out virtually impossible.
Rideshare services and delivery apps like Uber and Doordash also faced issues, which were likely caused by payment system outages.
Are things back to normal now?
The outage is being described as perhaps the biggest in history, but thankfully, it looks like it is already mostly resolved.
Deputy Secretary from the Home Affairs Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre says the issue should “self-resolve” within “the next hours and days.
“There is no reason to panic, CrowdStrike are on it, it is not a cybersecurity incident and we’re working as fast as we can to resolve the incident,” he said on X.
Most stores and services seem to be operating as normal on Saturday morning, with social media users reporting that even the Jetstar desk at Sydney Airport “didn’t look too manic.”
It should go without saying that anyone catching a flight today should probably allow some extra time to avoid an airport-induced headache.
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