There's a global outage of MicroSoft Windows machines currently, amusingly. This website is laid out in a very frustrating way, so I've included the main excerpts here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07...-microsoft-banks-airlines-australia/104119960 (archive)
There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.
The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.
Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.
Like a number of other organisations, global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems.
The issue is causing some holdups for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience.
There is no impact to our fixed or mobile network which continue to operate.
Calls to our Triple Zero contact centres are not affected, but we understand some state emergency services are also impacted and we are working with them to implement backup processes.
CrowdStrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft's Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor.
"Thanks for contacting CrowdStrike support. CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows … related to the Falcon sensor," a prerecorded message played when a Reuters reporter called the company's technical support.
University of Melbourne lecturer in cyber security Shaanan Cohney says there appear to be two separate things happening at once to cause the mass outages we are seeing.
The first issue, he says, appears to have been caused by a piece of software developed by a company called CrowdStrike.
"It's a computer security vendor that provides a monitoring service to large enterprises so they can see on computers within their control if there's any indications of suspicious activity or things that would require a security alert or to lock down the computer," Dr Cohney says.
"If someone makes the wrong type of mistake it can bring the whole system down.
"As far as we can tell what it looks like happened with this piece of software is the company issued a significant update and something in the update went wrong.
"Engineers at the company and those outside are scrambling to try to pinpoint the source so they can try to pinpoint the problem so that's why companies are telling their employees to shut down their computer in order to prevent them from updating so those employees can maintain some minimal capabilities and have access to documents that are offline."
Reporting by Andi Yu
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07...-microsoft-banks-airlines-australia/104119960 (archive)
There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.
The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.
Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.
Like a number of other organisations, global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems.
The issue is causing some holdups for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience.
There is no impact to our fixed or mobile network which continue to operate.
Calls to our Triple Zero contact centres are not affected, but we understand some state emergency services are also impacted and we are working with them to implement backup processes.
CrowdStrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft's Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor.
"Thanks for contacting CrowdStrike support. CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows … related to the Falcon sensor," a prerecorded message played when a Reuters reporter called the company's technical support.
University of Melbourne lecturer in cyber security Shaanan Cohney says there appear to be two separate things happening at once to cause the mass outages we are seeing.
The first issue, he says, appears to have been caused by a piece of software developed by a company called CrowdStrike.
"It's a computer security vendor that provides a monitoring service to large enterprises so they can see on computers within their control if there's any indications of suspicious activity or things that would require a security alert or to lock down the computer," Dr Cohney says.
"However, because it's in such a privileged position, if something goes wrong with it, if there's a programming mistake it has the capability to bring down the entire computer.
"If someone makes the wrong type of mistake it can bring the whole system down.
"As far as we can tell what it looks like happened with this piece of software is the company issued a significant update and something in the update went wrong.
"Engineers at the company and those outside are scrambling to try to pinpoint the source so they can try to pinpoint the problem so that's why companies are telling their employees to shut down their computer in order to prevent them from updating so those employees can maintain some minimal capabilities and have access to documents that are offline."
Reporting by Andi Yu
