Global IT Outage Update Saturday Morning

20 July 2024

A global IT outage is causing intermittent and widespread challenges for retailers on Friday evening New Zealand time and around the world. The outage is a cybersecurity issue related to CrowdStrike, which began hitting Microsoft systems on Friday afternoon. The outage impacted banks and payments, airports and retailers globally.

“The early indications on Saturday morning from businesses already open is that supermarkets are opening and are not currently experiencing difficulties with payments and point of sale systems, however as this global issue is now in “fix mode” there is the possibility of further outages. We urge consumers to be patient and if possible to have the ability to pay via cash and/or Eftpos, which was a more stable platform last night due to the agreements amongst banks to be able to transact offline” reports Carolyn Young, Chief Executive at Retail NZ.

“This is still a live issue that will continue to develop over the weekend and it emphasizes how much we rely on technology and the cloud to enable us to go about our daily activities. While we are a long way from the United States, we are not immune to being impacted to global events such as what we saw on Friday evening” added Ms Young.

There may be delays to dispatch of online purchases as retailers will need to wait for confirmation of payment once this issue is resolved.

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