Emergency meeting to determine response to technical failure

Further emergency meetings will be held to discuss the impact of a global IT outage in Australia.

Banks, airports, supermarkets, media companies and retailers were in trouble after Friday’s outage, which was caused by major cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike deploying a software update.

The National Coordination Mechanism, made up of government agencies and representatives of the affected sectors, will meet again on Sunday morning to discuss future steps following the outage.

Deputy Energy Minister Jenny McAllister said the government and sectors affected by the outage were working hard to ensure they are operational again.

“We are still in the recovery phase… more work needs to be done to ensure that the remaining issues arising from this outage can be addressed,” she told Sky News on Sunday.

“There will be an opportunity in due course to reflect on what has happened in recent days and whether it exposes vulnerabilities that we can address.

“The most important thing right now, and the focus for the government, is restoring service provision.”

Most businesses affected by the outage were operational again on Saturday.

Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Angus Taylor said the incident had reinforced concerns that large chunks of internet systems were in the hands of a few companies.

“It’s also very clear that government and business need to get smarter and better at dealing with these kinds of situations,” he told Sky News.

“This may mean that there is redundancy, that alternatives must be available and that there is not one organization or one company with too large a market share.”

The widespread outages raised fears that scammers would exploit the incident to target Australians with malicious texts and emails in a bid to obtain personal data.

Senator McAllister urged Internet users to be extremely careful about providing information online following the outage.

“There are clearly a number of actors trying to take advantage of this situation, and we urge Australians to be incredibly cautious at this time,” she said.

“People need to think very carefully before they give out information, any personal information, to someone who asks for it. Think about whether it makes sense. If you are insecure in any way, just stop.”

By means of Andrew Brown in Canberra