AFP – A large-scale outage wrought havoc on IT systems across Australia and New Zealand on Friday, causing travel delays, hampering television broadcasts, and forcing supermarket systems offline.

Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator said the “large-scale technical outage” was caused by an issue with a “third-party software platform”, allaying initial fears of hacker involvement.

Photos posted online showed large queues forming at Sydney Airport, which told AFP some airline operations and terminal services had been affected.

“Flights are currently arriving and departing however there may be some delays throughout the evening,” a Sydney Airport spokesman said.

“We have activated our contingency plans with our airline partners and deployed additional staff to our terminals to assist passengers.”

Christchurch International Airport in New Zealand similarly said it was “experiencing IT issues across a number of our systems which may affect flight arrivals and departures”.

New Zealand said banks and the computer network inside the country’s parliament had also been affected.

Australia national broadcaster ABC said its systems had been crippled by a “major” glitch, derailing some television and radio broadcasts.

Some self-checkout terminals at one of Australia’s largest supermarket chains were rendered useless, displaying blue error messages.

Telecommunications firm Telstra said some of its systems had been disrupted, possibly impacting emergency services that used its network.

Telstra said it was caused by “global issues” impacting software provided by Microsoft and American cyber security company Crowdstrike.

Microsoft and Crowdstrike could not immediately be reached for comment.

University of South Australia cybersecurity researcher Jill Slay said the global impact of the outages was likely to be “enormous”.

In Berlin, Germany, flights were suspended at Berlin Brandenburg airport in Germany due to a “technical problem”, a spokeswoman told AFP as several countries reported massive IT disturbances.

“There are delays to check-in and flight operations had to be cancelled until 10:00 am (0800 GMT),” the spokeswoman said, adding however that she could not say when they would resume.

The UK’s biggest rail operator also warned of possible train cancellations due to IT issues on Friday morning.

US tech giant Microsoft in Washington said it was taking “mitigation actions” after service disruptions.

“Our services are still seeing continuous improvements while we continue to take mitigation actions,” the company said in a post on social media platform X.

In a notice titled “Service Degradation”, Microsoft said users “may be unable to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services”.

The announcement came as Australia reported a large-scale outage of IT systems on Friday, with the country’s national broadcaster, its largest international airport and a major telecommunications company reporting issues.

Microsoft said access was limited as some users were only able to access Microsoft 365 in read-only mode while it works to fix the problem.

“We remain committed in treating this event with the highest priority and urgency while we continue to address the lingering impact for the remaining Microsoft 365 apps that are in a degraded state,” it said.

-- Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin