\u201cThis is a classic case of what happens when one supplier catches a cold, and the rest of us end up with the flu.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cybersecurity expert David Cullen<\/strong> pretty much nails it when summing up Friday\u2019s global IT outage, which knocked radio stations around the country off air.<\/p>\n With automated playout systems impacted by issues with CrowdStrike <\/strong>software, and the \u2018blue screen of death\u2019 looming large, stations were left scrambling to do the best they could with whatever resources they had at hand.<\/p>\n Staff got creative. Producers dashed home to grab their CD collections. triple j\u2019s<\/strong> Abby Butler <\/strong>manually played the news theme into her mic, directly from her phone. 2GB Drive <\/strong>host Chris O\u2019Keefe<\/strong> was still able to take phone calls, but with no ad breaks or pre-recorded content available, he was forced to talk for nearly three hours non-stop.<\/p>\n At Hope 103.2<\/strong>, Stephen Wilkinson<\/strong> panelled the emergency program and read from the paper.<\/p>\n Nova\u2019s Ricki-Lee, Tim & Joel<\/strong> remained on air, one of the only Drive shows still able to broadcast live.<\/p>\n Their Instagram post read: \u201cA nationwide Microsoft outage has SHUT DOWN Australian radio \u2026 except for us!! We\u2019re doing it old school around the country right now on Nova!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Microsoft<\/strong> now estimates that eight and a half million computers around the world were disabled as a result of the outage.<\/p>\n Radio Futurologist James Cridland<\/strong> says there will be learnings from this.<\/p>\n \u201cSome emergency playout system is probably a good idea to consider somehow; or, at least, having a few CD players available somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut it\u2019s been a busy few days for IT teams, many of whom have had to physically reset every single computer that was affected.\u201d<\/p>\n CrowdStrike has since apologised for the outage and Microsoft says while the underlying cause has been fixed, there\u2019s been a \u2018residual impact\u2019 on some apps and services.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n