Global IT outage live updates: Australian banks, airlines, media ...

This is just in from an Australian government spokesperson:

The Australian Government is working closely with the National Cyber Security Coordinator on this unfolding outage.

We understand Triple-0 services are currently not affected by this outage.

The information as it stands is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies.

As the Cyber Security Coordinator has said, there is no information to suggest this is a cyber security incident and they are continuing to engage across key stakeholders.

The National Emergency Mechanism group will meet shortly, co-chaired by the National Emergency Management Agency.

Several businesses and organisations are reported to be affected on DownDetector, a website that monitors and lists tech outages.

The number of reports coming in this afternoon is staggering, said ABC finance reporter David Chau, with Bendigo Bank being one of the businesses coming up with the most complaints.

"There is this line chart which shows the number of complaints just surging astronomically," he told ABC News.

"This morning there was something like zero complaints and in the past two hours that shot up to 1,500."

But just because an outage has been reported, it doesn't mean all customers of the business are affected, Chau said.

Watch the full video below.

We've just gotten this from a Telstra spokesperson:

Like a number of other organisations, global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems.

The issue is causing some holdups for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience.

There is no impact to our fixed or mobile network which continue to operate.

Calls to our Triple Zero contact centres are not affected, but we understand some state emergency services are also impacted and we are working with them to implement backup processes.

CrowdStrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft's Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor.

"Thanks for contacting CrowdStrike support. CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows … related to the Falcon sensor," a prerecorded message played when a Reuters reporter called the company's technical support.

University of Melbourne lecturer in cyber security Shaanan Cohney says there appear to be two separate things happening at once to cause the mass outages we are seeing.

The first issue, he says, appears to have been caused by a piece of software developed by a company called CrowdStrike.

"It's a computer security vendor that provides a monitoring service to large enterprises so they can see on computers within their control if there's any indications of suspicious activity or things that would require a security alert or to lock down the computer," Dr Cohney says.

"Because this software needs to see everything that is going on, it's very tightly integrated into the computer's software, so when you install it, it asks for a lot of permissions so that it can ask for everything going on on the computer.

"However, because it's in such a privileged position, if something goes wrong with it, if there's a programming mistake it has the capability to bring down the entire computer.

"If someone makes the wrong type of mistake it can bring the whole system down.

"As far as we can tell what it looks like happened with this piece of software is the company issued a significant update and something in the update went wrong.

"Engineers at the company and those outside are scrambling to try to pinpoint the source so they can try to pinpoint the problem so that's why companies are telling their employees to shut down their computer in order to prevent them from updating so those employees can maintain some minimal capabilities and have access to documents that are offline."

Reporting by Andi Yu

"Virgin Australia is aware of a large-scale IT outage impacting multiple airlines and other businesses which is having an impact on our operations.

"We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

"We appreciate the patience of all travellers as we work through a solution and will provide an update once more information is known."

Melbourne Airport has also said it is experiencing difficulties with check-in systems for select airlines.

Passengers have been advised to allow for extra time and monitor their respective flight updates.

Both domestic and international flight operations could be impacted.

Qantas check-in terminals have been confirmed to hit by outages in airports across the country including in Sydney and Canberra.

This situation has been moving very quickly.

A little earlier, here's how the ABC's national technology reporter Ange Lavoipierre explained things as news of the outages broke.

An Australian cyber outage appears to be related to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, a spokesperson for Australia's home affairs minister said on Friday, according to Reuters.

Home affairs minister Clare O'Neil also shared a post from the National Cyber Security Coordinator on X.

We've certainly been seeing it on computers across the ABC.

Often nicknamed the "blue screen of death" or BSOD, Microsoft says it happens when Windows has unexpectedly had to shut down.

They've got more information on this screen on their website.

We have contacted Microsoft to try and find out if they have more information on this.

So far emergency services in several states have told us they're able to keep working.

In Victoria, emergency services also say they've not been affected by the outage.

Ambulance Victoria, ESTA/Triple-0, Fire Rescue Victoria all say they are not having issues with internal or external communications.

There are reports from Victoria Police staff that internal IT systems are down but the extent is not known yet.

The Royal Women's Hospital and the Royal Children's also appear to be unaffected.

Reporting by Rachel Clayton

These are some of the photos flooding in:

Baskets have been put on top of the self-serve checkouts at this Coles in Canberra:

And at Sydney Airport's domestic terminal, crowds appear to be growing:

The National Cyber Security Coordinator says a "large-scale technical outage" is affecting people across Australia.

"There is no information to suggest it is a cyber security incident," they said in a statement posted to X.

In South Australia, the ambulance service, police and State Emergency Service say they not affected by the IT outage.

Adelaide Airport says a small number of bag drop facilities and flight information screens have been impacted.

But the airport says check-in, security screening and flights are operating as normal.

Reporting by Joshua Boscaini

Australian cyber security company CyberCX says it's aware and advising its customers of "an outage affecting organisations in Australia and New Zealand".

"We understand that this has been caused by an issue affecting organisations who have installed Crowdstrike Falcon in their IT environments," a CyberCX spokesperson says.

"Crowdstrike is a global cyber security company who provide detection and monitoring tools to cyber and IT teams.

"At this time, CyberCX is actively tracking the situation and are awaiting information detailing scope and recovery.

"We will continue to support affected customers as this incident evolves."

I've heard from several of you that payment systems are causing major disruption at supermarkets and fuel stations.

This petrol station at Wodonga, on the Victorian-NSW border, has closed.

My colleagues in Perth say as of roughly 4pm, flights were still leaving Perth Airport.

There were unspecified problems affecting fire services, but triple-0 calls were still operating.

We're receiving an extraordinary number of comments on the blog, so I can't keep across them all.

These are some of the accounts you're sharing:

Tom

We’ve boarded the plane but we’ve been grounded in Canberra Domestic Airport for an hour now on JQ651 because their passenger booking system failed just after we finished boarding.

anonymous student

From 2pm my school (Sydney) has had laptops blue screening. The problem may be irrelevant as we’ve been emailed the result of their troubleshooting (pointing at an antivirus software) but the timing is just uncanny. My laptop has bluescreened more than 3 times.

John

I work at a law firm, and all of our computers crashed at the same time! It was bizarre, but now they’re back up and running.

There's lots of discussion online about the possible cause of the outage.

We do know that Microsoft has reported a major technical outage affecting operations across the world.

The company said it was investigating issues with its cloud services in the US which had caused the grounding and cancellation of several flights.

Microsoft said its outage started at about 6pm ET on Thursday (8am Friday AEST), with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.

Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.

Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Universities, law firms, Bunnings, blood donation services, banks and supermarkets are among the places where readers are reporting experiencing outages.