A massive global outage at Microsoft has hit Australian companies including Qantas, ANZ, MyGov and Foxtel, with computers crashing and a ‘blue screen of death’ appearing.
On Friday afternoon, approximately 48 services appeared on the ‘down detector’ website in an unprecedented cyber event.
Computers in the countries began to crash and users posted pictures of the “blue screen of death” via online platforms that were still available.
Financial services providers including Bendigo Bank, NAB, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ, Bank Australia, St George, Adelaide Bank, Me Bank, Bank of Queensland and Visa have been affected.
Services 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.
The culprit appears to be global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, which promises to provide “cloud workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.”
The software is used by a number of news and television companies, with the exception of Daily Mail Australia.
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.’
More to come