SEVERAL companies in Singapore were hit by a global IT outage on Friday (Jul 19) afternoon.
The websites of several companies appeared unable to load from around 2 pm.
In response to queries from The Business Times, Changi Airport said that the check-in process for some airlines was being managed manually.
“Changi Airport ground staff are providing assistance to passengers, especially those with impending departure times,” said the airport’s statement.
National carrier Singapore Airlines (SIA) also said in a Facebook post that services at its Ion Orchard centre, as well as its reservation hotlines, were experiencing technical difficulties due to the global outage.
“There is currently no impact to SIA flights, which are operating as scheduled,” it said.
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Customers who wish to make a new booking or amend existing bookings have been advised to do so through the SIA website or SingaporeAir mobile app, said the airline. It also provided a link to a form for customers with urgent requests.
SIA’s budget carrier Scoot also announced that it has been facing disruptions to its flight-reservation system and check-in process, as well as some flight delays. It has activated additional staff to man the check-in counters at Changi Airport.
New company filings on the Singapore Exchange’s website appeared to have stopped loading at 1.10 pm, checks by BT found. These pages appeared to be back online at 5.44 pm.
Media outlets, including SPH Media’s BT and The Straits Times, have also been affected.
Singapore Post (SingPost) said on Instagram that it is currently “experiencing technical difficulties due to a widespread IT outage”.
Affected services include international and domestic shipping platforms and parcel-tracking systems, said the national postal services provider in response to BT’s queries.
Bill payments, SAM kiosks and POPStation label printing are also temporarily unavailable. But some services are still available; these include the POPStop App, the shop.singpost online platform and services related to the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) and the Health Promotion Board (HPB).
“POPStation collection is also functioning as usual,” said a SingPost spokesperson.
Crowd-sourced outage website Down Detector showed that telcos Singtel and M1, a subsidiary of Keppel, had several reports of services being affected at around 2.30 pm.
Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform Azure also had several reports lodged on the outage website at the same time.
BT has reached out to several companies for comment.
Overseas media outlets have reported that the outage appears to have been caused by an update from US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. The Nasdaq-listed firm was down as much as 14 per cent in pre-market trading.
Earlier in the afternoon, Microsoft said it was investigating a cloud services outage that grounded planes and disrupted flight operations in the US.
Airports in major cities including Sydney, Edinburgh and Amsterdam have also been affected, with boarding passes at some places being checked manually.
BT understands that DBS, OCBC and UOB are not affected by the outage; Singapore’s port operations and that of the operator PSA have also been unaffected by the global outage
This is a developing story.
