IT outage disables 8.5 million computers worldwide, causing ongoing travel disruptions and delays
It's now estimated that eight and a half million computers worldwide were disabled by Friday's IT outage. The federal government says that while systems are coming back online, there may be "teething issues" in affected sectors over the next week. International travellers, including some Australians, are still feeling the fallout, with delays in flights home.
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00:00A holiday to Japan has turned into an extended stay for Australian Leon Wilson.
00:08We were supposed to fly out on Friday night, but we've been stuck for the last few days.
00:17He and his partner will have to wait until Tuesday for a 16-hour non-direct flight home.
00:24They're not alone. The ABC's aware of Australians in Bali and the US in similar situations.
00:30It's a bit of a pain, but you know, this is the world we live in, I guess. Technology rules, right?
00:34Jetstar alone had to cancel more than 150 flights on Friday night. While systems are coming back
00:42online, the fallout from the global IT outage is expected to continue for days to come. Airlines,
00:49banks, supermarkets and media outlets were all impacted when major cyber security company
00:55CrowdStrike issued an update that crashed connected window systems.
01:01Was that a mistake by CrowdStrike? A one-off human error? Or is there a more systemic process issue
01:09that needs to be addressed in the way these updates are pushed out?
01:13For those who took a hit, compensation may be hard to come by.
01:17It goes back to the issue of what contractual arrangements are in place with different
01:23suppliers. The federal government held another meeting of its national coordination mechanism
01:28where it says CrowdStrike confirmed it's close to rolling out an automatic fix to the issue,
01:34which should speed up systems coming back online. Microsoft says it estimates 8.5 million devices
01:41were affected, which it says is less than one percent of all Windows machines. While those
01:46numbers might not seem significant on face value, what we always think about here is the impact
01:52that the disruption to those systems will have. Industry is calling for a full government review
01:57into system vulnerabilities, warning things would have been a lot worse if a nefarious player was
02:04involved.