Cyber outage hits government, media and telcos across Australia and New Zealand

By Lewis Jackson and Alasdair Pal

SYDNEY (Reuters) -A cyber outage related to issues at global cybersecurity firms CrowdStrike and Microsoft hit media, retailers, banks, airlines and telecoms companies across Australia and New Zealand on Friday.

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.

Victorian state police said some internal systems had been hit by the outage but emergency services were operating normally. The output of a number of media companies was also disrupted.

"Like a number of other organisations, global issues affecting CrowdStrike and Microsoft are disrupting some of our systems," a spokesperson for telecoms firm Telstra said on Friday.

"The issue is causing some holdups for some of our customers and we thank them for their patience."

CrowdStrike ran a recorded phone message on Friday when Reuters contacted its technical support saying it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft's Windows operating system relating to its Falcon sensor, without mentioning Australia.

There was no information to suggest the outage was a cyber security incident, the office of Australia's National Cyber Security Coordinator Michelle McGuinness said in a post on X.

"I am aware of a large-scale technical outage affecting a number of companies and services across Australia this afternoon,” it said in the statement which did not mention CrowdStrike.

"Our current information is this outage relates to a technical issue with a third-party software platform employed by affected companies."

New Zealand's parliamentary computer systems were also affected, according to Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, head of the parliamentary service.

State broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a "major network outage", without giving a reason.

In a pre-recorded message played on Sky News Australia as regular programming was disrupted, correspondent Tom Connell said the outage was not believed to be the result of a hack.

"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," he said.

A Reuters reporter saw error messages on payment systems at grocery chain Harris Farm in Sydney on Friday.

(Reporting by Alasdair Pal in Sydney; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)