Queues at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. Photo: SEM VAN DER WAL / AFP
A global tech outage is disrupting operations in multiple industries, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off-air and everything from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.
According to an alert sent by CrowdStrike to its clients and reviewed by Reuters, the company's "Falcon Sensor" software is causing Microsoft Windows to crash and display the "Blue Screen of Death".
The outages have rippled far and wide, affecting New Zealand businesses, banking and local councils - and international airlines alike.
Shares in CrowdStrike opened nearly 15 percent down on New York's Nasdaq stock exchange amid the outage, wiping about $12.5 billion off the value of the cybersecurity firm, BBC News reported.
St John and Wellington Free Ambulance's communications centres were both affected by the outage, with delays responding to some calls. St John said it got around the issue by using VHF radios and taking paper notes.
Acting Prime Minister David Seymour told RNZ he understood the ambulance services had worked through the backlog and were operating as normal by 11pm.
Tech analyst Peter Griffin told RNZ he had never seen the likes of this outage before. "I think this is the biggest singular IT outage probably in the last 25 years and maybe in history."
While CrowdStrike had deployed a fix, it would take a long time for that to roll out, he said. "IT technicians are going to have to go in on the weekend to a lot of companies around the world to apply a fix."
In the meantime, "you have people stranded in airports, you have people not able to sell groceries".
The cost would stretch into the billions of dollars, Griffin said, and noted the outage exposed a major point of failure in our tech systems.
See how it unfolded on 19 July here: