Australia is hit by a massive Microsoft outage as major banks, corporations, Qantas, ABC and Foxtel all suffer massive outages – and computers crash to the blue screen of death
A massive global outage at Microsoft has hit Australian businesses including Woolworths, Qantas, ABC, Foxtel and 7-Eleven, with computers crashing and a ‘blue screen of death’ appearing.
The country was hit by an unprecedented cyberattack on Friday afternoon, with at least 48 Australian services experiencing disruptions, website Down Detector reported Friday afternoon.
The outage was likely caused by Crowdstrike’s security software, which repeatedly caused computers to crash and display a “blue screen of death” message while users were posting photos to the online platforms that were still available.
Huge queues formed as cash registers at Woolworths supermarkets malfunctioned and departure boards at the airport broke, with airline staff advising customers to ‘google’ when their flight was leaving.
According to Down Detector, those affected include Bendigo Bank, NAB, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ, Bank Australia, St George, Adelaide Bank, Me Bank, Bank of Queensland and Visa.
Other services affected include MyGov, NBN, Centrelink, ASX and Australia Post, along with a number of social media entertainment services including Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, X, Xbox, Google Cloud, Open AI, Reddit, Nine, Foxtel and ABC.
Vodafone, Optus, Aussie Broadband, iiNet and Opticomm are among the telecommunications companies affected by the outage.
CrowdStrike promises “cloud workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.”
The CrowdStrike support page posted the following message: ‘CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.
‘Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor. Our Engineering teams are actively working on resolving this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.
‘Status updates will be posted below as soon as we have more information to share, such as when the issue has been resolved.
About 48 services appeared on the ‘down detector’ website on Friday afternoon in an unprecedented cyber event (photo)
Power outages are causing major delays in shopping centres and supermarkets such as Woolworths as customers are unable to pay for their groceries.
One shopper wrote on X: ‘90% of my local Woolworths tills had the #BSOD. Queues a mile long, absolute chaos.’
ABC News anchors were left without autocues and graphics, while Sky News cut back to an international Fox News broadcast for an hour. Sky then began playing a pre-recorded message.
Other Foxtel channels were replaced with the message: ‘We apologise for this interruption in broadcasting and will return to normal programming as soon as possible.’
An ABC reporter explained that they couldn’t get their vision on television.
“Somehow the studios and the cameras seem to be working, but I was sitting at my desk writing a script for the news when… the system that we use to produce our news bulletins and the output of our news bulletins crashed,” they said.
Friends on social media who work for different companies are all being hit with the same blue screen appearing on their computers.
“It seems like it’s making things pretty much impossible to put together news and get the news out. I think we’re doing the best we can right now in the studio, being able to reach reporters all over the country, but as far as being able to put things together, we’re having some serious problems with those computer systems.”
More to come
