THE Scottish Government has convened an emergency crisis meeting after a global IT outage.
Ministers were called to the Scottish Government Resilience Room (SGORR) on Friday after an issue with Microsoft systems hit services across the globe.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has said it is “actively working” to fix the flaw in an update for Microsoft Windows users that sparked an outage that knocked businesses and institutions around the globe offline.
In the UK, transport networks were thrown into chaos, GP surgeries were unable to book appointments or access patient records, and Sky News went off air.
In London, an emergency Cobra meeting was held at official-level – rather than ministers – on Friday morning to discuss the chaos, Downing Street said.
A spokesperson for the Scottish Government said that NHS Scotland services were only minimally affected, and that despite issues with UK train services, ScotRail and the Caledonian Sleeper service were unaffected.
They also said the government was aware of issues impacting travellers at Edinburgh Airport, and urged anyone experiencing trouble to check with their operator.
The Scottish Government spokesperson said: “In response to worldwide IT issues, the Scottish Government Resilience Room has been activated to assess any potential impacts across Scotland.
“The Scottish Government’s IT systems are functioning normally.
“There has [been] minimal impact on NHS services and patients should continue to attend all appointments as planned. There are no major outages reported for NHS Scotland systems.
“We are aware of impacts at Edinburgh Airport and would urge those travelling today to check with their operator.
“Impact is being experienced by a limited number of UK rail operators but at the moment ScotRail and the Caledonian Sleeper service is unaffected.
“SGORR will continue to liaise with partners and ministers will be kept updated throughout the day.”
A No 10 spokesperson said they were not aware of any Whitehall departments being hit by the outage.
CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said the company would “make sure that every customer is fully recovered” from the ongoing global IT outage.
Speaking to NBC’s Today Show, Kurtz said many firms were rebooting their computers and coming back online, but said it could still be “some time” before all systems had completely recovered.
“We’ve been on with our customers all night and working with them – many of our customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and operational because we fixed it on our end,” he said.
“Some of the systems that aren’t recovering, we’re working with them, so it could be some time for some systems that just automatically won’t recover, but it is our mission to make sure that every customer is fully recovered and we’re not going to relent until we get every customer back to where they were and we’ll continue to protect them and keep the bad guys out of their systems.”
