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Passenger services in Australia have returned to normal after Friday’s global CrowdStrike computer crash.
Jetstar was forced to cancel virtually all flights until 2am Saturday after its baggage systems were affected and check-in issues occurred.
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However, all other airlines were largely able to get their aircraft in the skies, though many services were delayed.
The international IT shutdown on Friday—dubbed the world’s biggest ever—was caused by a bungled software update issued by cyber security provider CrowdStrike.
The update caused blue screens to appear on Microsoft-operated systems, which prevented many firms from accessing their internet-based ‘cloud’ services.
For airlines, this particularly impacted boarding, check-in and baggage data.
Friday is a traditionally busy day for travel, with 393,000 passengers thought to be flying in and out of Australia on 19 July.
Jetstar also had to contend with its communication system being affected, making it difficult for the business to contact customers.
Despite the delays on Friday, Melbourne Airport reported on Saturday afternoon that just one Qantas and Virgin departure was cancelled as services were quickly restored.
George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, said on Saturday he wanted to “sincerely apologise” and understood the “gravity and impact of the situation”.
“We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority,” he said.
“The outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted.
“This was not a cyberattack. We are working closely with impacted customers and partners to ensure that all systems are restored, so you can deliver the services your customers rely on.”
On Saturday morning, Australia’s Cyber Security Minister, Clare O’Neil, called a press conference to explain how the outage affected Australia.
“What has occurred here is that, as we understand it, at about 2.09 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time yesterday, CrowdStrike issued an update, an update to a subset of their customers,” she said.
“That update had an error in it which caused system outages for computers that it was pushed to, so computers that were online at that time.
“The fix for this was provided not long after that event. So, not even an hour and a half after that event, CrowdStrike had found remediation for the error and sent remediation instructions to customers.
“The issue here is just the breadth of people that were using this particular software and the time it is taking to build and bring major systems back online.”
