'The world has not seen an outage like this': IT expert reveals cause of computer crash

Airports, banks, newsrooms and supermarkets across Australia and the world have come to a standstill after CrowdStrike’s Falcon, a cybersecurity system, pushed through an update on Friday about 3pm.

It quickly led to the “blue screen of death” appearing on Microsoft screens as users were locked out indefinitely.

Multiple media organisations reported issues with networks, including the ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9 and News Corp Australia. Network 10 had to cancel its evening bulletin.

It is also affecting multiple major institutions, with crowd-sourced website Downdetector listing outages for Foxtel, NAB, Bendigo Bank, Suncorp Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Me Bank and more.

There are reports of issues around the world.

Toby Murray is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne and said the world had  not seen an outage like this in recent times.

“Falcon is software that runs on your computer and it looks for signs of attack. So when your computer's got malware on it, or maybe your computer is under attack, Falcon is a little bit like antivirus,” Mr Murray told news.com.au.

“It's better to think of it as like antivirus on steroids and so Falcon runs on all these computers to help keep them secure.”

He explained that it was created by CrowdStrike, a well regarded cybersecurity and threat intelligence company, and that is why it is so widely deployed as they are regarded as a “market leader”.

“And unfortunately, there seems to have been a problem with a update today that has caused a lot to go wrong.”

The big question everyone is asking is when will systems return to normal once again. Mr Murray said there was currently an arduous manual work-around at play.

“It looks like there was an update to this software that's then causing the machines, the computers that Falcon is running on, to crash and not be able to restart properly,” he said.

“And at the moment there is a workaround, but it involves like manually rebooting the computer in safe mode and deleting deleting some files and then rebooting it in so at the moment, the only workaround sort of involves this quite manual process, and that means it's super unclear whether we will see and when we will see a widespread fix for the issue.”

He said the company may be able to push out a fix that automatically rectifies the issue or it may be a case that all the machines that have crashed require manual work to get them going again.

“Things could take a while. It’s not clear yet,” he said.