Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has gone on leave for five days to Queensland, as companies across Australia get back on track after a huge outage brought down IT systems worldwide.
The Australian economy is currently in the “recovery phase” following Friday’s outage, sparked by a flawed update pushed out by American anti-virus software company CrowdStrike.
Banks, supermarkets and airports were among those industries launched into chaos amid the IT disruption, which has been described as one of the largest in history.
The ripple effects of the global outage are still being felt across Australia on Saturday, particularly for travellers at airports facing derailed flight plans.
A spokesperson for Mr Albanese said the Prime Minister will be continually briefed on the outage as he goes on planned leave from Saturday.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles will step into Mr Albanese’s shoes in his absence.
“The Prime Minister will be on leave for five days from Saturday 20 July 2024,” a spokesperson confirmed to SkyNews.com.au
“During this time, the Deputy Prime Minister will be Acting Prime Minister.”
The development comes as Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil provided an update about how the Australian economy was responding in the 24 hours after the IT event.
Ms O’Neil explained the major disruption was caused by an “error in an update” pushed out by CrowdStrike to its customers about 2.09 pm AEST on Friday.
The Home Affairs Minister said although operations at many major companies are back on track, there are still “teething” issues in the aftermath of the outage.
She warned Australians and small businesses to be on the lookout for scammers attempting to take advantage of the situation.
“What we are seeing some reporting of is attempts to conduct phishing through the incident that’s just occurred,” Ms O’Neil told reporters.
She urged Australians not to give away personal details or banking information if they receive a message that looks suspicious.
Crowdstrike, which is based in Texas, overnight revealed the issue stemmed from an update it rolled out to a cloud-based product called Falcon.
The company’s CEO George Kurtz issued an apology to its customers after the outage crippled operations at some of the world’s largest businesses.
In a statement, the tech company said it is “actively” working with customers who had been impacted by “a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts”.
“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” it said.
“We are referring customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous public updates on our blog.”
The Australian government has stressed the outage was not a cyber security incident, and the National Coordination Mechanism has met twice since the outage.