Australia and New Zealand cyber outage hits government, media and telcos

A cyber outage related to an issue at global cybersecurity firm 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.
A spokesperson for New Zealand’s parliament said its computer systems had also been affected.
State broadcaster ABC said it was experiencing a “major network outage”, without giving a reason.