The crowd at Changi Airport Terminal 4 on July 20, 2024, at around 9.45am. - ST PHOTO: SHINTARO TAY
SINGAPORE (The Straits Times/ANN): A day after an unprecedented global outage crippled some systems around Singapore on July 19, services islandwide largely returned to normal, including all airline check-in services at Changi Airport.
A handful of services, however, were still bedevilled by technical issues for much of July 20. At Changi Airport, budget airline AirAsia continued work to restore its servers, resulting in snaking queues at its Terminal 4 check-in counters through the morning.
AirAsia staff worked manually to issue boarding passes to keep scores of passengers moving until 2pm, when its systems were finally restored.
Operator Changi Airport Group said at 7pm that check-in processes of all affected airlines were back to normal.
While some offices, apps and public systems from postal services to carpark gantries went offline temporarily on July 19, the chaos was felt most keenly at the airport in the wake of a flawed security update by global cyber-security service provider CrowdStrike.
The US company serves tens of thousands of enterprises worldwide, such as offices, transport networks and hospitals. The disruption affected machines running on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
The impact of the outage continued to reverberate around the world on July 20, even as services by air travel and healthcare to shipping and finance went back online.
Airports in Britain scrambled to deal with hundreds of displaced passengers, while in the US, flights continued to be held up as airlines worked to clear a backlog of cancellations and delays. In Australia, the first nation to report the outage, checkouts at some supermarkets remained unserviceable.
Singapore’s Ministry of Digital Development and Information said that by 6am on July 20, most companies affected by the outage in the country had restored their services to the public. These included newspaper, radio and postal services.
Digital Development and Information Minister Josephine Teo wrote on Facebook at 1pm that the global outage was “serious and concerning”.
Passengers affected by the IT outage queueing at the Scoot check-in counters at 4.10pm at Changi Airport Terminal 1 on July 19, 2024. -- ST PHOTO: LIM YAOHUI
“My team had been working through the night to support companies in Singapore whose services to the public were affected by the outages,” she said. “Our immediate priority was to help them recover, and I am glad that most of these services are back to normal.”
Mrs Teo noted, however, that the impact of the outage here, while concerning, was not the worst compared with other countries as the Republic’s essential and government services were mostly unaffected.
Affected organisations, such as postal services, recovered relatively quickly as business continuity plans kicked in.
“While we were less impacted, it will be unwise to think that we are more resilient than others,” she said.
Such incidents, Mrs Teo added, underscore the need for organisations to set in place swift recovery measures and plans to keep their business going.
The authorities will engage their counterparts, as well as Microsoft and other firms, to learn from the incident, she said.
Information technology staff in many sectors had their work cut out for them. They had to restore the affected servers and devices by rebooting them manually.
The Housing Board said its service provider worked overnight to fully restore the electronic gantries at 185 carparks that went down when the outage happened.
Carpark operator Wilson Parking had on July 19 lifted the gantries of its affected carparks to let vehicles through as many motorists had been held up.
At Changi Airport, nearly 100 people were called up to support AirAsia’s operations over the weekend, a spokesman for the airline told The Sunday Times.
The disruption brought down the systems of more than 10 airlines at Changi Airport on July 19, delaying more than 40 flights and forcing check-in processes to be done manually. Low-cost carriers AirAsia, Scoot, Jetstar and Cebu Pacific Air were among those affected.
Elsewhere in Singapore, many businesses resumed operations hours after the outage.
National postal service SingPost told ST on July 20 that its operations were fully restored by the evening of July 19, after the outage tripped up its tracking system, bill payments, self-service kiosks and other services.
Even as systems were gradually restored, many organisations across the globe were still confronting a backlog of delays and frustrated customers.
Globally, more airlines reported the resumption of normal business as the day progressed.
Even so, more than 11,000 flights in the US had been delayed, causing some passengers to wait nearly a full day for rescheduled flights.
According to data from aviation analytics company Cirium, 1,848 of 104,000 flights scheduled globally on July 20 were cancelled, with the US being hit the hardest. In Singapore, one flight was cancelled out of a total of 471 trips scheduled, Cirium recorded.
In Britain, patients collecting prescriptions at pharmacies were warned of possible delays over the weekend.
In the meantime, CrowdStrike faces mounting pressure as affected organisations count the cost of the massive outage. Experts anticipate a wave of legal claims to be handed to CrowdStrike and Microsoft, as insurers themselves brace for a surge in business-interruption claims.
CrowdStrike chief executive and founder George Kurtz said he was deeply sorry for the impact of the outage.
He said the whole company had been mobilised to support its customers and urged affected companies to seek help if needed.
Mr Kurtz wrote: “As we resolve this incident, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.” - The Straits Times/ANN
