Johannesburg – The mysterious global IT outage that has affected several sectors including airports, railways, banks, stock exchanges, media outlets, and hospitals, appears to be spreading.
In South Africa, Capitec Bank told clients in a message sent out Friday: “We are experiencing nationwide service issues including card. We are working hard to resolve this. We apologise for any inconvenience”.
BBC reports that American Airlines says none of its flights are taking off and the IT problems are due to an issue with Crowdstrike cybersecurity software.
Microsoft earlier said it was taking mitigation action, but the cause of the outages hasn’t been confirmed.
News18 reports that, while several flights had to be grounded across the world with airport check-in systems crashing, the Sky News network was completely shut briefly and several Windows systems went down with the blue “screen of death”.
Reports said that the outage happened at CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company powering security on Microsoft Windows.
In what was being called one of the biggest IT outages, Australia called an emergency meeting while other countries went manual at airports and halted flights as a precaution.
Just before noon, Capitec said it had resolved the issues and all systems had been restored.
Soon after that, Microsoft said the underlying IT outage had been resolved but residual effects were still affecting some services.
Meanwhile, the Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) said it was not affected by the global Microsoft outage linked to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike that is impacting numerous organisations including some airlines around the world.
ACSA does not use CrowdStrike services.
“We want to assure all stakeholders and the public that the ACSA airport network remains unaffected by this outage with operations running as normal,” the airport company said in a statement Friday.
ACSA said it relies on cutting-edge, state-of-the-art cyber protection capabilities to ensure the security and continuity of operations.
“Our robust cybersecurity measures are designed to safeguard against a wide range of threats, ensuring seamless functioning of our critical infrastructure,” said ACSA.
“We remain committed to maintaining the highest standards of cybersecurity and operational excellence.
“Nevertheless, our airport management team continues to monitor the situation closely.”
ACSA added: “In view of the widespread impact of the global outage, we would like to encourage all travellers to contact their respective airlines for further flight information.
“Travellers are also encouraged to download the ACSA Mobile App and subscribe for LIVE flight notifications.”
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