Australia: Cyber outage hits major companies

Follow DW's live coverage of the global mass IT outage here.

A number of companies in Australia were hit on Friday by what the country's cybersecurity authority said was a "large-scale technical outage," with other countries around the world also reporting technical disruptions.

"Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies," the office of Australia's National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a statement.

"There is no information to suggest it is a cyber security incident. We continue to engage across key stakeholders," the statement on X, formerly Twitter, said.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Home Affairs said that the outage seemed to have to do with a problem at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, but this was not mentioned in McGuiness's statement.

Broadcasters, airlines, banks affected

Among the institutions affected was national broadcaster ABC, which said that its operations had been disrupted.

Sky News Australia also said that regular programming had been interrupted. 

"Our computers, our systems are down, all the things that make Sky News run down and indeed for many other major companies around the country," correspondent Tom Connell said.

Australia's largest bank, Commonwealth Bank, said some customers had been unable to transfer money due to the service outage. National airline Qantas and Sydney
airport said planes were delayed but still flying.

Britain's Sky News also reported that it was off air on Friday morning, while Spanish airports and a Turkish airline also said they had problems.

 tj/fb (Reuters, AFP)