A massive global Microsoft outage has hammered Australian businesses including Woolworths, Qantas, the ABC and Foxtel, 7-Eleven – with computers around the country repeatedly crashing and displaying the ‘blue screen of death’.
The country was struck by an unprecedented cyber event on Friday afternoon, with at least 48 Australian services suffering outages, according to the Down Detector website on Friday afternoon.
The outage is believed to have been caused by Crowdstrike security software which caused computers to crash, with users posting photos of the chaos on the online platforms that were still available.
Massive queues formed as checkouts failed at Woolworths supermarket stores and airport departure boards failed prompting airline staff to advise customers to ‘Google’ when their flights left.
Financial services include Bendigo Bank, NAB, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ, Bank Australia, St George, Adelaide Bank, Me Bank, Bank of Queensland and Visa have been impacted, according to Down Detector.
Other services affected 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, Foxtel, and the ABC.
Vodafone, Optus, Aussie Broadband, iiNet, and Opticomm were among the telecommunications companies impacted by the outage.
CrowdStrike promises to ‘provide cloud workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.’
The company informed users the outage was not due to a hack. It said: ‘There is no information to suggest it is a cyber security incident. We continue to engage across key stakeholders.’
Another message on the CrowdStrike support page read: ‘CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.
‘Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.
‘Status updates will be posted below as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.
About 48 services appeared on the website ‘down detector’ on Friday afternoon in an unprecedented cyber event (pictured)
Outages have caused major delays at shopping centres and supermarkets like Woolworths, with customers left unable to pay for their shopping.
One shopper wrote on X: ‘90% of my local Woolworths registers had the #BSOD. Queues a mile long, absolute chaos.’
ABC News anchors were left without autocues and graphics, while Sky News reverted to an international Fox News broadcast for an hour.
Sky then started playing a pre-recorded message from reporter Tom Connell, standing in front of a blue error screen.
Other Foxtel channels were replaced by the message: ‘We apologise for this break in transmission and will return to normal programming as soon as possible.’
One ABC reporter explained they could not put vision to air.
‘Somehow, studios and cameras seem to be working, but I was sitting at my desk, scripting a story for the news when … the system we use to build our news bulletin and the output our news bulletins crashed,’ they said.
‘Social media friends working for different companies all being affected by the same blue screen popping up on their computers.
‘It appears it is making things pretty impossible in terms of putting news together and the news to air. I think at the moment, we are doing the best we can in the studio, able to cross to reporters around the country, but in terms of being able to put things together, we are having serious troubles with those computer systems.’
Major delays are also expected at airports, as self-service check-in systems came to a grinding halt.
More to come
