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Australia – and the world – continues to deal with the fallout from Friday’s (19 July) cyber security outage that knocked millions of Windows PCs offline.
Australia’s federal Minister for Cyber Security and Home Affairs, Clare O’Neil, held another meeting of the National Coordination Mechanism on Sunday (21 July) morning after a catastrophic outage linked to a CrowdStrike cyber security update caused Windows machines the world over to crash to a blue screen of death.
“There has been a huge amount of work over this weekend to get the economy back up and running. However, it will take time until all affected sectors are completely back online. In some cases, we may see teething issues for one or two weeks,” Minister O’Neil said in a statement on LinkedIn on Sunday.
Minister O’Neil added that “Triple 0 and emergency services are completely operational” and that CrowdStrike representatives were present.
“CrowdStrike informed the meeting this morning that they are now close to rolling out an automatic fix to the issue with their update, as is Microsoft. This should increase the speed at which systems across the economy are back online,” Minister O’Neil said.
“Supermarkets, like many other sectors, are still experiencing issues, but the sector stressed that there are no food shortages and no need to stockpile food.”
However, Minister O’Neil continued to warn consumers to be aware of a raft of scams circulating in the wake of the outage.
“Examples that have been reported include people posed as airlines offering to resolve issues with delayed flights and criminals posing as technical support offering to fix affected technology,” Minister O’Neil said.
“It is very important that Australians are extremely cautious of any unexpected texts, calls or emails claiming to be of assistance with this issue. You can help by making sure vulnerable people, including elderly relatives, are being extra cautious at this time. Report any suspicious communications through Scamwatch.
“I encourage anyone who is travelling, shopping at supermarkets or filling up the car to build in some extra time and be patient with workers who are trying to get systems back online.
“I am personally thankful to every worker, both in IT and across the economy, who has worked through this weekend to get our economy moving again.”
Further updates will be distributed as required.
The incident occurred on 19 July after cyber security firm CrowdStrike released an update to its Falcon endpoint security platform that caused Windows PCs to crash to a blue screen, unable to boot up again. Numerous television networks were impacted, and airports and airlines around the world experienced shutdowns and other disruptions, while supermarkets and other retail outlets were forced to turn to cash or close entirely.
Some government services were impacted as well, and the recovery is expected to take days or even weeks.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz offered an unreserved apology as the outage continued to unfold into the weekend.
“Nothing is more important to me than the trust and confidence that our customers and partners have put into CrowdStrike,” Kurtz said in a statement.
“As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.”
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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