Everything we know a

Australian banks, supermarkets, airports and many other businesses have been rocked by a global IT outage.

The outage struck on Friday and is believed to have been caused by an issue at CrowdStrike — a United States-based cybersecurity company.

Multiple industries around the world were impacted, with computer systems shut down and public services disrupted.

Here’s what we know so far.

What caused the outage?

There has been numerous reports, the problem seems to be impacting Windows-based computers, causing them to display the dreaded "blue screen of death," which denotes a total system failure. Only the business system was affected as the individual’s system are still up and running.

According to George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, "a defect found in a single content update" was the root of the problem, not a security breach or cyberattack.

"There was no cyber or security incident today. Our clients are still completely safe," he posted on X.

"We understand the gravity of the situation and are deeply sorry for the inconvenience and disruption."

He had earlier claimed that the problem had been located, isolated, and that a solution had been implemented.

CrowdStrike claimed in a blog post that its Falcon sensor was the cause of the crashes.

"We are working on a technical update and root cause analysis that we will share with everyone as well," Kurtz added.

The disruption started on Friday at roughly 3.30 p.m. AEST, according to National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness' social media posts.

What is a Falcon sensor?

Although the company's website refers to it as a system that provides "real-time threat protection," CrowdStrike did not seem to go into depth about this in the statement that was made public.

According to the website of the company, the CrowdStrike Falcon is designed with the specific intention of preventing breaches using a single, integrated suite of cloud-delivered technologies that guard against "all types of attacks".

According to Toby Murray, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne's School of Computing and Information Systems, "Falcon is what is known as an Endpoint Detection and Response platform, which monitors the computers that it is installed on to detect intrusions (i.e., hacks) and respond to them," a statement released by the Australian Science Media Centre stated.

“This indicates that Falcon is a somewhat special piece of software because it can affect the behaviour of the computers on which it is installed."

What could have caused the Falcon sensor issue?

Experts suggest that rather than being a hack, the most likely cause was a bad update.

According to Scott Jarkoff, the former director of threat intelligence for the Asia Pacific, a "bad update pushed out to the sensor" is what happened in this case, not a hack, he told the Australian Financial Review.

Jarkoff told the newspaper that he thought it probably would have had an impact on people who had enabled automatic updates. He thought that only if the manual updaters had continued would they have been impacted.

Toby Murray compared Falcon to antivirus software, which is updated often to guard against the most recent dangers.

"We have certainly seen anti-virus updates in the past causing problems," he added.

According to the federal government and authorities, there is currently no information indicating that a cyberattack was the source of the outage.

"This is a technical issue, caused by a CrowdStrike update to its customers," stated Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil in a statement on Friday night, after CrowdStrike, according to her, attended a National Coordination Mechanism meeting.

"We can confirm there is no evidence that this is a cyber security incident," she added.

How was Australia affected by the outage?

Telstra, Microsoft, Google, NBN, Foxtel, National Australia Bank, ABC, ANZ, and Bendigo Bank were among the companies reported as experiencing outages by the crowdsourcing website Downdetector.

Airports, including those in Sydney and Melbourne, Qantas, and Virgin Australia also had issues as a result of the outage.

According to a representative for Virgin Australia, the company is aware of a "wide-ranging IT disruption affecting numerous airlines and other enterprises, which is affecting our business operations."

SBS News was informed by Coles and Woolworths that their stores' operations have been impacted.

There were problems with ABC, SBS, Nine, Network Ten, and Sky News, among other media organizations.

Even Australian football supporters were affected; on Friday night, Essendon, an AFL team, advised supporters to arrive at Docklands Stadium in Melbourne with their actual tickets.

The Australian National Relay Service acknowledged that efforts were underway to bring back services.

The federal government claimed that its ability to make emergency triple-zero calls did not seem to be impacted.