Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has gone on holiday, while the ripple effects of a major IT outage are still being felt across the country as recovery efforts continue.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized for the global IT outage caused by a failed Windows software update. “We know what the problem is, we’re working on it and we’ve fixed it now,” Mr. Kurtz said. “Our mission … is to make sure every customer is fully recovered and we won’t back down until we get every customer back where they were.” CrowdStrike shares fell about 18 percent as a result of the technology outage.
The Australian economy is currently in a ‘recovery’ phase. After the outage that occurred on Friday, which was caused by a flawed update released by the American antivirus company CrowdStrike.
Banks, department stores and airports were among the industries thrown into chaos amid the IT disruption, which has been described as one of the biggest in history.
The ripple effects of the global power outage are still being felt across Australia on Saturday, especially for travellers at airports facing unscheduled flight plans.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has gone on holiday as businesses across the country continue to get back on track after a massive outage that brought down IT systems around the world. Photo: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman
A spokesman for Mr Albanese said the prime minister would be kept updated on the outage while he goes on a planned holiday from Saturday.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles is set to replace Mr Albanese in his absence.
“The Prime Minister will be on leave for five days from Saturday 20 July 2024,” a spokesperson for the Prime Minister confirmed to SkyNews.com.au.
During this period, the Deputy Prime Minister will be the Acting Prime Minister.
The development comes as Home Affairs Minister Claire O’Neill provided an update on How the Australian economy responded in the 24 hours after the IT event.
Woolworths shoppers were hit with a ‘blue screen of death’ at self-checkout during a power outage on Friday. Image: X
Ms O’Neill explained that the main disruption was caused by a “bug in an update” that CrowdStrike sent to its customers at around 2.09pm AEST on Friday.
The interior minister said that while operations at many major companies were back on track, there were still “initial” problems in the wake of the outage.
Australians and small businesses are being warned to beware of scammers trying to take advantage of the situation.
“What we’re seeing in some of the reports are attempts to conduct phishing operations through the incident that just happened,” Ms O’Neill told reporters.
Australians are urged not to give out their personal details or banking information if they receive a message that looks suspicious.
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Texas-based Crowdstrike revealed that the issue stemmed from an update it released to a cloud-based product called Falcon.
The company CEO George Kurtz has issued an apology to his customers. After the outage paralyzed operations at some of the world’s largest companies.
In a statement, the tech company said it is “actively working” with customers who were affected by “a bug found in a single Windows Host content update.”
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” the company said.
“We refer customers to our support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide full and ongoing public updates on our blog.”
The Australian government has confirmed that the outage was not a cybersecurity incident, and the National Coordination Mechanism has met twice since the outage.
