Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has issued a message of calm as Australia suffers one of the largest cyber attacks in its history.
Mr Albanese sent the message via X at 6.47pm on Friday after Australia was hit by a global outage of Microsoft operating systems at 3pm, with problems traced back to the security of CrowdStrike software in the US state of Texas.
“I understand Australians are concerned about the ongoing service outage that is affecting a wide range of services globally,” Albanese wrote.
‘My Government is working closely with the National Cyber Security Coordinator.
‘There is no impact on critical infrastructure, government services or Triple-0 services at this stage.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sent a message of reassurance after Australia suffered a massive cyber blackout
“The National Coordination Mechanism has been activated and is now meeting.”
The National Coordinator of Cyber Security also sent a message on day X at 4:21 p.m.
“I am aware of a large-scale technical disruption affecting a number of businesses and services across Australia this afternoon,” they wrote.
‘Our current information is that this outage is related to a technical issue with a third-party software platform used by the affected companies.
“There is no information to suggest this is a cybersecurity incident. We remain in contact with key stakeholders.”
Cyber Security Minister Clare O’Neil echoed the comment but did not say anything.
The disruption caused chaos across the country and massive queues formed as tills stopped working at Woolworths and Bunnings supermarkets.
Airport departure boards also failed, prompting airline staff to advise customers to Google when their flights were leaving.
Financial services companies including Bendigo Bank, NAB, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ, Bank Australia, St George, Adelaide Bank, Me Bank, Bank of Queensland and Visa have been affected, according to Down Detector.
Other affected services include MyGov, NBN, Centrelink, ASX and Australia Post, along with a range of social media entertainment services including Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, X, Xbox, Google Cloud, Open AI, Reddit, Nine, Foxtel and ABC.
Vodafone, Aussie Broadband, iiNet and Opticomm were among the telecoms companies affected by the outage.
Courts across the country were also forced to close their doors after 3 p.m., when systems went completely offline.
CrowdStrike on its website promises to “deliver cloud workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyber response services.”
There was chaos at Australia’s major airports as flight information boards stopped working
A message on CrowdStrike’s support page read: ‘CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon sensor.
‘Symptoms include hosts experiencing a blue screen or bugcheck 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.’