O’Neil’s ‘critical’ message to Australians after global outage

Minister for Home Affairs Clare O’Neil has provided an update on the CrowdStrike tech outage. An unprecedented global IT outage that has crippled systems around the world is still being felt with disastrous consequences. “All Australians will be aware that there were a number of significant issues yesterday afternoon; most of which were resolved last night,” Ms O’Neil told a news conference. “The Australian economy is now in the recovery phase.”

Major companies, banks, supermarkets and airlines were thrown into chaos on Friday by a failed update from American antivirus company CrowdStrike.

The Home Affairs Minister provided an update on Saturday on how the Australian economy is responding to the event, described as one of the largest power outages in history.

Ms O’Neil explained that the major disruption was caused by a “bug in an update” CrowdStrike had sent to its customers. She stressed that the outage was not a cybersecurity incident.

“What happened here is that CrowdStrike issued an update yesterday at approximately 2:09pm AEST, an update for a subset of their customers,” she told reporters.

“There was a bug in that update that caused a system outage on the computers the update was pushed to, so the computers that were online at that time.”

Ms O’Neil noted that CrowdStrike provided a “fix” for the problem about an hour and a half after the outage began on Friday.

She shared a “critical” message to Australians and small businesses, warning people to be wary of scammers trying to take advantage of the global outage.

“We are seeing reports of phishing attempts through the incident that just occurred,” Ms O’Neil said.

“What we’re hearing is that small businesses and individuals in particular are getting emails from people pretending to be CrowdStrike or Microsoft, saying that you need to enter your bank details to access a reboot, that you need to pay, that you need to enter your personal details so that your systems can be brought back online.

“Can I ask all Australians to be extra cautious over the coming days regarding attempts to use this for scams or phishing?”

Ms O’Neil urged Australians not to give out personal or banking information if they receive a message that looks suspicious.

“If you see a text message that looks a little weird, that says something about CrowdStrike or outages, just stop. Don’t give any details,” she said.

“If someone called you and wanted to help you reboot your system, I would hang up the phone.

“The trick that scammers always try to use here is to find ways to keep you talking and get you to keep giving away your personal information.”

She urged Australians to report suspicious messages to the Australian government’s Scamwatch website.

Ms O’Neil said the Australian economy was currently in a ‘recovery phase’, meaning that while activity at major companies was starting to pick up again, there were still ‘teething problems’.

“Woolworths for example, the shelves are fully stocked. We don’t have any food shortages. You don’t have to worry about that,” she said.

Woolworths has said that all of its stores are open today, but not all checkouts and tills may be open in all supermarkets across the country.

“At the same time, we have seen that the major airlines are back online, but there may be internal technical issues.

“For example, baggage handling systems that communicate with the front of the terminal.”

Woolworths customers were faced with a ‘blue screen’ at self-checkouts during the outage, while travellers were left in chaos at airports due to delayed flights.

Ms O’Neil urged the community to be “patient” and “thoughtful” of others during this time.

“Don’t take this out on your supermarket staff. If you have to wait a little longer. It’s absolutely not their fault,” she said.

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Asked if there was any indication of how much the power outage has cost, Ms O’Neil said the government’s main priority is to get the economy back on its feet.

“There is no question that there will be a significant conversation about the costs CrowdStrike poses to businesses and consumers and how the company has handled this issue,” she said.

“Those questions are for another day. Our focus right now is on citizens, and that is absolutely appropriate for this period.”

Ms O’Neil said the outage was a “very serious incident” for the economy and was “certainly the biggest” IT outage she had ever experienced.

“In terms of the size and scope of this event, I’ve read that this is the largest IT outage in world history,” she said.

“That’s definitely possible, it’s definitely the biggest in my lifetime.”

Ms O’Neil said the National Coordination Mechanism had met twice since the outage. She stressed that emergency services were online and Triple-0 services were operational.