Passenger services in Australia have returned to normal following Friday’s global Crowdstrike computer crash.
Jetstar was forced to cancel almost all its flights until 2am on Saturday due to disruptions to its baggage system and boarding problems.
However, despite many flight delays, other airlines’ planes were largely able to fly normally.
The world’s largest IT system outage on Friday was caused by a botched software update released by cybersecurity provider Crowdstrike, in what has been called the largest IT system outage in history.
The update caused blue screens on Microsoft’s operating system, preventing many companies from accessing their internet-based “cloud” services.
For airlines, this particularly affects data related to boarding, check-in and baggage.
Friday is traditionally the peak travel season, with 393,000 passengers expected to fly in and out of Australia on July 19.
Jetstar also faced problems with its communications systems being affected, making it difficult for the company to reach customers.
Despite the delays on Friday, Melbourne Airport reported on Saturday afternoon that only one Qantas and Virgin flight had been cancelled as services quickly resumed.
CrowdStrike Chief Executive Officer George Kurtz said Saturday that he wanted to “sincerely apologize” and understood “the severity and impact of what happened.”
“We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus fully on restoring our customers’ systems as our top priority,” he said.
“The outage is due to a bug discovered in the Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.
“This was not a cyber attack. We are working closely with impacted customers and partners to ensure all systems are restored so you can provide the services your customers rely on.”
On Saturday morning, Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security Claire O’Neill held a press conference to explain the impact of the outage on Australia.
“From what we understand, what happened is that at about 2:09pm AEST yesterday, CrowdStrike released an update that was released to some of its customers,” she said.
“There was a bug in that update that caused an outage on the computer systems that were pushing the update, so there were issues with computers that were online at the time.
“CrowdStrike provided a fix shortly after the incident occurred. So within less than an hour and a half after the incident, CrowdStrike found a remediation for the bug and sent remediation instructions to customers.
“The issue here is just the range of people using this particular software and the time it takes to build and restore major systems.”
