The global tech outage has sparked Friday night chaos at major airports across Australia as check-in computers and departure boards crashed.
Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin were all affected by outages along with major banks, retailers and media and entertainment companies.
The catastrophic global outage was caused by a ‘bad’ update of Crowdstrike antivirus technology on Microsoft computers – causing them to display the ‘blue screen of death’.
Some Qantas passengers were even told to ‘Google’ when their flights were departing in a desperate workaround with departure boards non-operational.
‘Qantas (is) telling passengers to Google their flight to find out when it leaves and at what gate because everything is down,’ one passenger wrote on X.
Sydney Airport said it had activated its ‘contingency plans’ and rushed additional staff to its terminals.
‘If you’re travelling today make sure you leave plenty of time to come to the airport and check with your airline regarding the status of your flight,’ a spokesperson said.
Melbourne Airport said it ‘is experiencing a global technology issue which is impacting check-in procedures for some airlines.
‘Passengers flying with these airlines this afternoon are advised to allow a little extra time to check-in. Please check with your airline for flight updates.’
Computer screens displaying the departure and arrival times of flights at Sydney Airport are instead showing the ‘blue screen of death’ (pictured)
A Qantas spokesperson confirmed the airline is experiencing some impacts to systems due to the outage.
The spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia they are working with their providers to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Another X user reported Jetstar‘s computer systems were also down at Sydney Airport where the airline announced it ‘can’t check in or board passengers’.
A later announcement from Virgin reportedly revealed the airline had ‘no ability to get flight plans’.
A Virgin spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the airline is ‘working to resolve this issue as soon as possible’.
‘We appreciate the patience of all travellers as we work through a solution and will provide an update once more information is known,’ the spokesperson said.
A Jetstar spokesperson said they are also ‘impacted by a global software issue that’s impacting airlines and other businesses around the world’.
‘We are working with our providers to resolve the issue as quickly as possible,’ the spokesperson said.
The outage is severely effecting airlines across the United States, where Microsoft revealed they first experienced the outage from at about 6pm ET (8am AEST) on Thursday, Reuters reports.
One passenger on American airline Delta said they weren’t allowed to board their plane despite ‘the crew and people are ready’.
A worldwide tech outage has crashed computers checkin-ing passengers for major Aussie airlines and airports on Friday afternoon (stock image)
Another Delta passenger said they were ‘sitting on a full plane going nowhere’.
Cyber expert Troy Hunt told Seven News the catastrophic crisis was not affecting all Microsoft Windows computers – but many of them.
Mr Hunt explained that CrowdStrike creates anti-virus products that regularly update with new definitions of viruses.
‘They run in a very privileged space on the PC, which means they have a lot of control.
‘It looks like they’ve pushed a bad update, which is presently nuking every machine that takes it.’
‘It could be quite some time to get those machines back on time’.
