A tech outage triggered by a software update reverberated around the world on Friday (Jul 19), causing massive disruptions to numerous businesses.
Air travel was most visibly affected, with chaotic queues in airports from Auckland, New Zealand in the east to San Francisco, in the US in the west. In Singapore, Changi Airport said, more than 10 airlines were affected. With the computer system down, airlines resorted to printing boarding passes the old-fashioned way – pen on paper.
“We worked with our airport partners to bring in additional resources to support the manual check-in process. At the same time, Changi Airport ground staff have been providing assistance to affected passengers,” said the airport’s statement.
National carrier Singapore Airlines (SIA) noted: “There is currently no impact to SIA flights, which are operating as scheduled.” However, services at its Ion Orchard centre, as well as its reservation hotlines, were experiencing technical difficulties, it said in a Facebook post at 4.30 pm.
It advised customers who wish to make a new booking or amend existing bookings to do so through the SIA website or SingaporeAir mobile app. The airline also provided a link to a form for customers with urgent requests.
At 7 pm, SIA provided an update to say that its service centre and hotlines were working again.
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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.
As at 8.45 pm, the airline said its services “are being restored progressively”.
Airports in major cities including Sydney, Edinburgh and Amsterdam have also been affected, with boarding passes at some places being checked manually.
Microsoft said it was investigating a cloud services outage that grounded planes and disrupted flight operations in the United States.
New company filings on the Singapore Exchange’s (SGX) 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.
In response to queries from The Business Times, SGX said trading was not impacted and its markets remained “fair, orderly and transparent”.
There was, however, some impact to Internet-dependent services, such as SGX’s price feed Web service, and post-trade services on the Central Depository. The majority of trades were successfully settled and a limited number will be rolled over for settlement on Monday, said SGX.
Media outlets, including SPH Media’s BT and The Straits Times, were also affected.
Singapore Post (SingPost) said on Instagram around 5 pm that it was currently “experiencing technical difficulties due to a widespread IT outage”.
Affected services included international and domestic shipping platforms and parcel-tracking systems, said the national postal services provider in response to BT’s queries.
Bill payments, Self-Service Automated Machine (SAM) kiosks and POPStation label printing were also temporarily unavailable. But some services were 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 Downdetector showed that telcos Singtel and M1, a subsidiary of Keppel, had several reports of services being affected at around 2.30 pm. BT understands that M1’s operations are continuing normally.
A Singtel spokesperson told BT that the company’s network and connectivity services were not affected by the global IT outage, but some customer services, such as its hotlines and online purchase flows, were affected.
“Our IT teams promptly restored our hotlines and are urgently working to progressively restore the other services,” said the spokesperson.
Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform Azure also had several reports lodged on the outage website at the same time.
A Microsoft spokesperson told BT: “We are aware of an issue affecting a subset of customers. We acknowledge the impact this can have on customers, and we are working to restore services for those still experiencing disruptions as quickly as possible.”
Technical issue at CrowdStrike
Separately, the company is aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to an update from a third-party software platform. “We anticipate a resolution is forthcoming,” said the spokesperson.
The outage was linked to US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. A spokesperson said the company is actively working with customers affected by “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” said the spokesperson.
The company referred customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide updates on its website.
CrowdStrike also confirmed that the issue was not caused by a security incident or cyberattack, and that it does not affect Mac and Linux hosts.
The Nasdaq-listed firm was down as much as 14 per cent in pre-market trading.
In a statement on Friday evening, the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI) said it is aware of the incident, which it said was “a technical issue involving software from Microsoft and CrowdStrike”, based on the information the ministry has currently.
Government services, local banks, telcos and hospitals are not affected by the incident, said MDDI. However, it is aware that the outage has affected several companies in Singapore in delivering services to the public, and is monitoring the impact and assisting companies.
In a Facebook post on Friday night, Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo said Singapore Cyber Emergency Response Team (SingCert) has issued an advisory outlining steps for administrators and users of affected systems to mitigate the impact.
SingCert is parked under the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, and facilitates the detection, resolution and prevention of cybersecurity-related incidents on the Internet.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) also highlighted, in a press statement on Friday evening, that the Singapore dollar money market and foreign exchange market had functioned normally.
Financial institutions reported no or limited impact to customers and their key operations, said MAS. “Some experienced disruptions to internal-facing systems used by staff but in all cases, critical systems were unaffected.”
Likewise, MAS said, its systems were not affected by the IT outage.
BT understands that Singapore’s port operations and that of the operator PSA have also been unaffected by the global outage.
A Citi spokesperson told BT: “In Singapore, critical applications within Citi’s banking systems have not been affected thus far.” – Additional reporting by Benjamin Cher, Renald Yeo, Mia Pei and Navene Elangovan
