LOCALLY, the Wonthaggi Hospital and supermarkets have only been experiencing a ‘minor impact’ from the computer outage affecting banks, airports, supermarkets and businesses across Australia and the world.
Initially Coles and Woolworths supermarkets across the region from Cowes to Wonthaggi and Leongatha posted ‘cash only’ notices as self-serve checkouts went down.
But typical of the experience elsewhere, where some computers at the same sites were affected and others not, the supermarkets found some of their checkouts remained open allowing business to get back to normal.
Aldi supermarkets were unaffected.
But with eftpos machines down at some cafés and restaurants, some remained closed on one of the busiest nights of the week.
At Bass Coast Health, which operates the Wonthaggi Hospital, they’ve experienced only a minor impact.
“The health service is experiencing minor impact thus far. Most of our systems are holding and where they are not, we have our workarounds in place,” said BCH CEO Jan Child.
“I have heard that some Melbourne staff are having trouble getting petrol to get to work and it’s tricky to call a local taxi.
“A code yellow has been called in line with usual processes when there is an interruption to usual operations.”
Of more concern is the very busy situation at the Wonthaggi’s emergency department tonight.
“Our ED and urgent care centre are particularly busy with some very unwell patients and this issue may delay some reporting so we apologise in advance for any delay to our non-urgent patients."
It needs to be stressed that while the computer outage has impacted some medical services, people who an experience a medical emergency can still call ‘Triple 0’ which is still fully operational.
The same goes for a fire, police or other emergency.
Computer security company CrowdStrike is linked to what is a widespread, major IT outage.
Airport check-in systems across the globe have been disrupted and businesses have reported the "blue screen of death" and IT outages.
* Reports of the outage in Australia began flooding in about 3pm AEST
* Outages have hit banks and payment systems, forcing some supermarkets and petrol stations to close
* Airport check-in systems have been disrupted and businesses have reported the "blue screen of death" and IT outages
* So far, triple-0 services and core emergency services say they are able to work
* At this stage, Australian authorities believe the outage is linked to the cyber security firm CrowdStrike and is not the result of a cyber attack
* A major cyber security company says CrowdStrike has put out a fix to try to address the issue.
