In a cataclysmic turn of events, a major global outage Microsoft outage wreaked havoc upon Australian shores, plunging businesses including Woolworths, Qantas, the ABC, Foxtel, 7-Eleven and hosptials into chaos.
Windows systems and computers across the nation succumbed to repeated crashes, ominously flashing the dreaded ‘blue screen of death’.
According to reporters across Nine’s newspapers laptops suddenly crashed and displayed a blue screen with the words: “Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart. We’re just collecting some error info, and then we’ll restart for you.”
In Melbourne, Channel Nine News were forced to improvise the start of their 4pm news bulletin after not being able to access prepared news packages.
“CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor,” CrowdStrike said in a recorded phone message.
In a statement on X, Microsoft said it was “investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services,”.
Microsoft says the outage initially started about 6pm on Thursday, with some customers experiencing issues with Azure services.
Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services. Microsoft also said it was investigating an issue affecting Microsoft 365 apps and services.
Financial Services
Financial services including Bendigo Bank, NAB, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ, Bank Australia, St George, Adelaide Bank, Me Bank, Bank of Queensland and Visa were also impacted.
Gov And Other Cloud Services
Other services 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, and Foxtel were also affected.
Telecommunications
Several telecommunications providers in the country, including Vodafone, Aussie Broadband, iiNet, and Opticomm, faced significant disruptions due to the outage.
Justice System
Australian courts were also forced to close their doors after 3pm, when systems were shut down due to the widespread global Microsoft outage.
Triple-0 services were reported still working as normal, with Victoria Police saying: ‘Victoria Police are currently able to receive and dispatch calls from Triple Zero Victoria.
Healthcare
Western Health has declared a code yellow (reached capacity or under stress) across all three hospitals—Footscray, Sunshine, and Williamstown—prompting staff to resort to pen and paper for operations. Cancer patients booked in for radiation treamtments have been turned around and told to go home.
The incident occurred around 3pm on Friday, marking an unprecedented cyber event affecting at least 48 Australian services, as reported by the Down Detector website.
Initial assessments suggest the outage stemmed from issues with Crowdstrike security software operating on Microsoft servers, resulting in widespread global windows computer system failure.
Long lines snaked through Woolworths supermarkets due to checkout failures, while Bunnings and airport departure boards also experienced outages. Airline staff recommended frustrated customers to resort to using ‘Google’ to check their flight schedules.
Outage Symptoms
‘CrowdStrike acknowledged issues with crashes on Windows hosts linked Falcon Sensor. The symptoms reported include hosts encountering a bugcheck or blue screen of death error.
Cyber Attack Ruled Out
National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness confirmed the Windows outage affecting Australian businesses was not a cyberattack.
“I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” says Lieutenant General McGuinness.
Earlier today, Microsoft announced that its cloud services have been largely restored following an outage that impacted its cloud applications in the United States. The cause of the outage, and whether it was connected to CrowdStrike’s update, remains unclear.
In a statement on X, Microsoft said it was “investigating an issue impacting users ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services. We remain focused on redirecting the impacted traffic to healthy systems,” Microsoft said.
