A global Information Technology (I.T.) outage that disrupted multiple sectors including banking, flights, healthcare and technology across the globe on Friday is being closely monitored by the Ministry of Communications Information and Technology (M.C.I.T.). 

The historical IT crisis followed the Crowdstrike incident affecting Microsoft software and applications and it likely affected Microsoft users in Samoa. 

In a press statement from the M.C.I.T. Chief Executive Officer, Lefaoalii Unutoa Auelua-Fonoti said the disruption caused by the software update is widespread and significant, with the effects being felt across multiple sectors. The sectors include healthcare, media, finance, technology and local government. 

"Samoa as one of the Microsoft users, there will likely be impacts in some operating systems except Linux and Apple," said Lefaoalii. 

"This activity is not the result of a security incident or malicious cyber activity rather it’s an IT issue.

The Ministry strongly advises organisations for their IT staff to make sure they recover the system files of the computer as well as ensuring that there is always backup storage for files and systems in times of digital crisis."

Lefaoalii assured they will continue to monitor the latest development of this incident and every responsive measure taken.

"This incident has been reported to have affected major services globally on Friday, 19th July, 2024 and resulted into major global service disruptions. 

"These outages of the majority of Microsoft services were a result of a CrowdStrike software update. Whilst Microsoft have confirmed that several of their services experienced disruption across the night of 18th July, these issues have subsequently been resolved."

According to reports, majority of the current disruption has been caused by a software update issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to its popular cybersecurity tool, Falcon.

The software update issues are only understood to affect Microsoft Windows devices, causing many to enter a crash and reboot cycle, hence the conflation of the two separate strands of activity.

CrowdStrike is reported to have issued a fix for the problem which should largely be successfully automatically, but some customers will require manual intervention. 

Lefaoalii also warned against some malicious websites that have released codes claiming to help customers recover from the outage. 

"M.C.I.T. encourages all customers to source information from CrowdStrike sources only or Contact SamCert Team on email [email protected]." 

In New Zealand, it reported the largest outage in history disrupting banking, flights, transportation and retail operations in the country. 

Online shoppers have also reported to have experienced delays in purchases being dispatched as retailers would need to wait for confirmation of payment once the issue was resolved.