The global IT failure could have been far worse, says the Prime Minister. Photo: File.
Anthony Albanese praised the resilience of Australian Government agencies in the wake of the CrowdStrike global IT outage that caused chaos around the world on Friday (19 July).
However, the Federal Government is taking further steps to bolster critical infrastructure across the country as a result.
Speaking on Monday (22 July), the Prime Minister said both government and business entities held up well through the crisis, but some tidying up will need to take place.
He said the outage, which hit millions of computers – affecting numerous transactions in the retail, travel, banking, media and government services sectors – had had an impact, but it was “far less than what we thought it might be”, and Australians should take a “great deal of heart” in their institutions.
He urged patience while services were being normalised and told Australians not to take out their frustrations on frontline workers.
“We know that over the next week or two, there will be some legacy issues that we continue to deal with,” Mr Albanese said.
“I think we can be quite proud of the way that all levels of government, as well as the business community, have responded to this global event that occurred last Friday.
“By and large, things have been back on track.
“I again call for people to be patient where there are legacy issues that are still being dealt with and make sure that they don’t take out what is understandable frustration on frontline workers at our supermarkets or in service delivery.
“But I think the response of government agencies across the board, as well as business, shows how resilient we are as an economy and as a people and that we can be quite proud of the fact that this very significant global event was dealt with in a way that minimised the impact on the Australian people.
“[The response] was recognising that many people were, of course, inconvenienced, but it was dealt with in a way that was efficient and in a way that tried to minimise that disruption.”
A crisis meeting was called on Friday in response to the IT upgrade that failed catastrophically, affecting mostly Microsoft computers.
CrowdStrike attended that meeting, as did some government agency heads, supermarket bosses, transport and telecommunications companies, and essential services providers.
The National Coordination Mechanism within the National Emergency Management Agency was called into action.
The mechanism brings together the Federal Government, states, territories, industry, and community organisations to, according to its own statement, “ensure effective and efficient consequence management of events across the emergency management continuum”.
Following that meeting, the Prime Minister was quick to state there was no impact on critical infrastructure or emergency government services and that the government was working closely with the National Cyber Security Coordinator in tackling the issue.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil described the unprecedented outage as a cybersecurity incident and technical issue caused by a CrowdStrike update to its customers.
“The company has informed us that most issues should be resolved through the fix they have provided, but given the size and nature of this incident, it may take some time to resolve,” she said.
“Governments are closely engaged at all levels, focused on bringing together the affected parties and ensuring government entities institute the fix as quickly as possible.”
The Minister also warned businesses and consumers to be particularly vigilant in the wake of the outage so as not to fall victim to scammers trying to capitalise on the event.
She said bad actors had immediately mobilised their efforts to steal from small businesses by offering “fake fixes” to the outage and pretending to be CrowdStrike or Microsoft.
“What we are seeing some reporting of is attempts to conduct phishing through the incident that just occurred,” she said on Saturday.
“I ask Australians to be really cautious over the next few days about attempts to use this for scamming or phishing.
“If you see an email, if you see a text message that looks a little bit funny, that indicates something about CrowdStrike or IT outages, just stop. Don’t put any details.”
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