It is officially the biggest technical crash the world has ever seen. While many Australians woke to a much calmer situation, the ramifications of the mass global outages are still being realised.
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00:00First came the crash.
00:05Airlines, banks, businesses, supermarkets and media organisations were left scrambling
00:12thanks to a global technical glitch.
00:15Just like a classic blue screen of death, yeah.
00:17It's kind of hectic, massive lines, a lot of the self-checkouts aren't working.
00:22Airlines were among the worst affected, with delays and cancellations continuing today.
00:28We found the pilot of the flight that would have been our flight.
00:31The pilot was unaware that the flight had been cancelled.
00:35I'm a sitting duck, just sitting here, not sure whether that disconnecting flight will happen.
00:40So I'm waiting for my six hours.
00:42Are you exhausted?
00:43Tired.
00:46Tired.
00:47Plenty were feeling that.
00:49Taxi drivers around the three motels all booked out, queues up the front, came back and slept,
00:55tried to sleep in the chair amongst, I don't know, 30, 40 other people sleeping on the floor.
01:01Some businesses were forced to close during the outage because it affected payment systems.
01:07Really had to tell the customers to go home.
01:09A lot of people don't carry cash anymore, so lost a lot of income.
01:13Had to send the workers home.
01:15What do you do?
01:16Things slowly came back online this morning.
01:19For now, fingers crossed.
01:21But not everyone's as fortunate.
01:24Metro areas are a more complex setup.
01:28There are more computers in more complex networks.
01:32In the regions, the networks are simpler.
01:37And I think they probably fared better for that reason.
01:41The glitch happened in two parts.
01:43Microsoft's cloud service was the first to notice something was wrong.
01:48Then CrowdStrike, a tech company providing cyber protection to major businesses around the world,
01:55issued a software update.
01:57But that update had a bug in it.
02:00Crashing connected Microsoft systems.
02:03I think this has been a sharp wake-up call about the fragility of our digital ecosystem,
02:08that we can depend so much on single systems.
02:12It's still too early to determine the economic impact of the crash.
02:16And the government warns the threat isn't over yet.
02:19Could I ask all Australians to be really cautious over the next few days
02:23about attempts to use this for scamming or phishing?
02:27This IT business is expecting a jump in demand in coming days.
02:31People want to be reassured that their computer's safe.
02:34Lucky it's now back online to help.