PARTS OF THE world were thrown into chaos today as a global IT outage has resulted in cancelled flights and interferences with businesses, healthcare and banking.

Websites including ABC News Australia and Ryanair are down as Microsoft confirmed that it is investigating the error.

All Spanish airports, three Indian airlines, and Amsterdam Airport have reported being significantly affected by the outage.

Governments have jumped into action to try to reduce the impact, but how did it happen and how will Ireland be affected?

What happened?

A cyber-security firm Crowdstrike has said that the problem was caused by an update to its Falcon antivirus software, designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.

It’s been stressed that the outage is not from hackers and there is no risk of a data breach. It’s simply a technical error with far-reaching implications. All essential services are up and running, however, because it’s mostly “peripheral” systems that have been hit. 

Ireland is lucky to not see the worst of it, as Crowdstrike isn’t widely-used here, says Joseph Stephens, Director of Resilience at the National Cyber Security Centre.

What it underlines is really how completely dependent we are on digital infrastructure, not just here in Ireland, but across the globe.

“We have been fortuitous in that CrowdStrike hasn’t been deployed here,” Stephens told RTÉ’s News at One.

“It’s not a situation, really, that people could have prepared for if, ironically, people who have deployed CrowdStrike, which is quite an advanced piece of software, are the ones who are being most affected by this.”

He said, however, that Ireland has protocols to deal with outages like this, and government information officers met this morning shortly after the issue was alerted.

Who in Ireland is affected?

The RSA has said some of its NCT test centres are not in operation due to the “significant disruption”. 

However, Athlone, Cork Little Island, Deansgrange, Fonthill, Greenhills and Limerick centres are fully operational.

Appointments can’t be booked online, but can still be made over the phone by calling 01-4135992.

The RSA said applications for learner permits and driving licences “cannot currently be processed at NDLS centres”, and it is currently not possible to contact customers to cancel today’s appointments.

It said driving tests are currently taking place, adding that tests can be booked and customers are advised to arrive for their test as scheduled.

The Leap Card top up app and TFI Live are also not working, but card holders can still top up in shops.

Flights

Dublin Airport was largely unaffected today. It used manual workarounds instead, which exist for this exact scenario.

The DAA has said that there are currently no widespread issues there or at Cork Airport, with Ryanair’s check-in processes currently the most impacted. 

Ryanair has advised passengers to arrive three hours before their scheduled departure time. 

Whiteboards being used at @belfastairport as all the screens are blue. Passenger Martin McElroy took this, and told us that it's like “the dark ages, but to be fair they’re making it work, which you have to give them credit for.” #outage pic.twitter.com/FfSmEHCvuO

— Stephen Murphy (@SMurphyTV) July 19, 2024

Aer Lingus said its flights are mainly operating as normal, but there may be some processing delays at airports.

It also advised customers to allow extra time before their flight and to check the airline’s website or app for updates. 

The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has told passengers that if their flight is cancelled due to the outage, they are entitled to choose a refund or re-routing to your destination.

Companies panicked

Connor Flynn is Managing Director of Waystone Compliance Solutions, which has been helping some of the companies affected.

He said it’s been quite “traumatic” for IT administrators, who initially worried it was a cyber attack.

He found that companies had done “very little” to prepare for this type of outage.

“It’s almost a chicken and egg situation,” he said.

Security professionals advise clients to keep their cybersecurity software updated to protect them, but today it did the opposite.

“Because of the speed with which these cyber threats are propagating now across the globe, you need that rapid updating to defend against them,” he said.

“We expect much better of our service providers in this space, such as CrowdStrike and others, to have done their due diligence, their effective testing against the patch before it’s deployed.”

When will it all be fixed?

Speaking to NBC’s Today Show in the US, CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said the company would “make sure that every customer is fully recovered”.

Many firms were rebooting their computers and coming back online, he said, but it could still be “some time” before all systems had completely recovered.

“We’ve been on with our customers all night [US-time] and working with them – many of our customers are rebooting the system and it’s coming up and operational because we fixed it on our end,.”

Asked if he ever thought an outage of this scale was possible, the CrowdStrike founder said: “Software is a very complex world and there’s a lot of interactions, and always staying ahead of the adversary is a tall task.”

Flynn said it will be difficult to fix quickly as every device has to be individually fixed to remove the corrupt file.

Servers, which are computers in date centres largely running without manual assistance, could take even longer to fix.

Flynn stressed that, while inconvenient, the outage has only had an “availability impact”, but nobody’s personal or financial data has been compromised.