Cork commuters face difficulties caused by global IT outage
Passengers flying out of Cork Airport were today advised to arrive at the airport three hours in advance as Ryanair had been impacted by the outage, with delays to the majority of Ryanair flights from Cork, some up to three hours.
A global IT outage affected some services in Cork Airport today, including flights, however all essential services continued to operate normally.
In the wake of the incident, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said that it was “aware of a global incident concerning the latest update of CrowdStrike security software”.
“Whilst there are impacts in several sectors, all essential services continue to operate normally. Similarly, Government IT is not currently affected,” it said.
The NCSC said it would “continue to work with any providers affected to gain an understanding of how their systems may have been affected, and to provide assistance remediating the issue”.
Passengers flying out of Cork Airport were today advised to arrive at the airport three hours in advance as Ryanair had been impacted by the outage, with delays to the majority of Ryanair flights from Cork, some up to three hours.
The airline said it had been forced to cancel a small number of flights, apologising for the inconvenience caused due to the third party issue.
Cork commuters also faced difficulties as the TFI Leap Card Top Up system and their live update app were both down due to the outage, leaving people unable to top up leap cards or check bus times from their phones.
Both services were functional again by late afternoon.
Meanwhile, a lecturer in Business Information Systems at University College Cork, warned that it could take some time to rectify the knock-on impact of such an outage.
“CrowdStrike software is designed to protect Windows systems from cyberattack.
“The software keeps an eye out for viruses, malware, and attempts to attack the system from outside.
“When a Windows system boots up, if CrowdStrike is installed, then the software runs just after the PC is powered on.
“What happened here is that a specific piece of software called Falcon Sensor, after a faulty update, causes Windows to fail on startup,” Dr Simon Woodworth explained.
“A fix has already been announced and obviously companies affected will work to deploy it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the knock on effects will take much longer to clean up."
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