AirAsia’s parent Capital A Chief Executive Officer Tony Fernandes has demanded answers and compensation from Microsoft after the global IT outage has caused airlines to lose “millions” in revenue and has created chaos in people’s lives due to system failure.
“It’s good that CrowdStrike has apologized, we will wait to hear from Microsoft on how this has happened causing airlines to lose millions of dollars in revenue, but more importantly how their system failure has caused so much chaos to people’s lives,” he wrote in a Linkedin post on Sunday.
“Tech companies have little empathy. What we went through with Covid they had no sympathy. Now they have issues they expect us all to understand. Well I’m not going to. Airlines need answers and compensation,” he added.
According to Fernandes, situation seems to have stabilised on day two of the global IT outage affecting AirAsia’s operations at terminal 2 of Kuala Lumpur international airport but the aviation group is “not letting its guards down and stand ready for any further disruption.
“Immensely proud of my team of Allstars who have rolled up their sleeves from the senior management to every ground staff to make sure everyone’s travel plans are not disrupted. We are doing everything manually including check-in, printing board pass and baggage drop, and more than 100 Allstar volunteers are on the ground to lend a helping hand,” he said.
In a separate statement, Microsoft said the global tech outage that was related to a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has affected nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices, the tech company said in a blog post on Saturday.
“We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services,” Microsoft said.
On July 18, CrowdStrike, an independent cybersecurity company, released a software update that began impacting IT systems globally.
“Although this was not a Microsoft incident, given it impacts our ecosystem, we want to provide an update on the steps we’ve taken with CrowdStrike and others to remediate and support our customers,” Microsoft clarified in a blog post on Saturday.
In Malaysia, it was reported that the global outage of IT operations running on Microsoft-based systems seems to have hit Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) with reports on social media from users, saying that operations have been disrupted at Terminal 2.
Long queues have been sighted as the kiosks are Terminal 2 are not operational, forcing travellers to manually check in at counters, the Malay Mail reported on Friday.
According to Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd, a total of 20 departing flights at KLIA Main terminal has been delayed.
The global tech glitch affected flights, banking and company operations in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, India and Australia, according to various media reports.
CrowdStrike Founder and CEO George Kurtz has earlier apologized about the outage on Friday (July 19).
“I want to sincerely apologize directly to all of you for the outage. All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation. We quickly identified the issue and deployed a fix, allowing us to focus diligently on restoring customer systems as our highest priority,” he said in a statement.
“The outage was caused by a defect found in a Falcon content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This was not a cyberattack,” he explained.
“We are working closely with impacted customers and partners to ensure that all systems are restored, so you can deliver the services your customers rely on,” he added.
Microsoft says about 8.5 million of its devices affected by CrowdStrike-related outage