Global tech outage deeply disruptive in Australia, less so in S. Korea and China

Undergraduate student Gabriel was working at his part-time job when Microsoft Windows kept suddenly shutting down on him.

- Clement Tan and Jonathan Pearlman

It took him a while to realise that he was part of a global technology outage on July 19, caused apparently by an error in an antivirus update run by CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm whose software is used worldwide. The disruptions halted global commerce and brought several countries to almost a standstill.

“We ended up getting an early finish since there was nothing my team and I could do. It was a pretty twisted way to say TGIF,” said Gabriel, who is based in Melbourne, Australia. He wanted to identify himself only by his first name because he is not authorised by his employer to speak to the media.

TGIF is a contraction of the phrase “thank God it’s Friday”, commonly used to express the prevailing sentiment at the end of the work week.

But other than students in Britain, who were released early on their last day of the school term before the start of the long summer holidays, for many the outage brought little relief.

Airports from Bangkok and Berlin to New Delhi and New York warned passengers to arrive hours earlier for security checks that had to now be conducted manually in some cases, with many flights grounded.