Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil says the company at the centre of the world’s biggest IT outage has told the federal government it is close to an automated fix that would allow systems to come back online.
The global outage on Friday afternoon came after cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike updated a widely used cloud-based software product called Falcon.
The update to the Falcon software, which interacts with other parts of computer systems and software such as Microsoft’s Windows products, caused a malfunction that essentially disabled those systems globally.
Microsoft, in a blog update from its vice president of operating system security, David Weston, said it estimated that 8.5 million Windows devices had been affected worldwide.
O’Neil posted on social media Sunday afternoon that Crowdstrike had informed a meeting of federal and state governments and the private sector that they are “now close to implementing an automatic fix for the issue with their update, as is Microsoft.”
The meeting came as part of the national coordination mechanism, which was established during the Covid-19 pandemic to bring together federal, state and territorial governments and agencies together with the private sector.
This is the third meeting of the mechanism since the blackout.
“This should increase the speed at which systems across the economy come back online,” O’Neil said. published in X.
“A lot of work has been done over the weekend to get the economy moving again.
“However, it will take time for all affected sectors to be fully operational again. In some cases, we may see initial problems for one to two weeks.”
On Sunday Crowdstrike said “The issue has been identified and isolated and a fix has been implemented,” he said, reiterating that it was not a cyber attack. He advised customers to check the company’s support portal for software updates.
“We understand the seriousness of this situation and deeply regret any inconvenience and disruption,” he said.
O’Neil said the outage did not cause any impact on critical infrastructure or government services.
He said supermarkets, like many other sectors, were still experiencing problems, but said the sector stressed during the meeting that there was no shortage of food and there was no need to stockpile it.
O’Neil also warned again about scammers trying to take advantage of the service disruption.
“Examples that have been reported include people posing as airlines and offering to resolve issues with delayed flights, and criminals posing as technical support and offering to repair affected technology.
“It is very important for Australians to be extremely wary of any unexpected text messages, calls or emails purporting to offer assistance with this issue.
“You can help by making sure vulnerable people, including older family members, are especially cautious at this time.”
Australia’s largest business organisation said it could be days before some businesses are back up and running.
Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar said smaller businesses may have to wait until Monday for IT support.
“The timing couldn’t have been worse, a Friday and particularly a Friday afternoon,” he said.
“That means many businesses will have to wait until early next week to implement the fixes they need to make.”
McKellar said it was difficult to say how much the IT disruption had cost businesses.
He said it would be unlikely that companies would be able to receive compensation for their losses, but that this could depend on their contractual arrangements.
“Overall, the impact has been broad and has cost many businesses time, money and lost sales. It is very difficult to put a dollar amount on it,” he said.
“(The losses) are material, they are significant, we have to hope that most companies can withstand that kind of impact.”
