Microsoft outage: Australian Michael Sentonas leads Crowdstrike - the company just sparked tech chaos that grounded flights, shut supermarkets and knocked banks offline

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An Australian tech guru will likely battle through a storm of chaos in the coming days and weeks as fallout from Friday's global IT outage that crippled banks, supermarkets and airlines from Australia to the United States grows.

Melbourne man Michael Sentonas leads CrowdStrike, the publicly-listed cyber-security firm that caused the meltdown, alongside CEO and founder George Kurtz, after first joining the company in 2016 as vice president of technology strategy.

He served as chief technical officer from 2020 to 2023, when he was promoted to president of the widely-respected and growing company.

Mr Sentonas gave an interview earlier this year in which he boasted about about helping other companies deal with IT breaches and how they shouldn't attempt to 'trivialise' any problems.

'If an organisation has been breached, I'll often work with the team to coach them on how to deal with it,' he told The Age.

'That could be how to deal with press, or avoiding coming out to say, 'there's a sophisticated adversary'. I try to coach people on being open and transparent about what happened and how you're dealing with it, which is so critically important to the customer,' he said.

'You have to go to your customers and be upfront, and if you try to trivialise it, it won't go well.'

Mr Sentonas, a multi-millionaire, attained a bachelor in computer science from Edith Cowan University in WA before he moved to Silicon Valley where he became one of the most senior Australian executives. He is worth an estimated $225million. 

Michael Sentonas (pictured) from Melbourne is the global president of Crowdstrike and is one of the few Aussies to have made it big in tech central Silicon Valley 

Flight boards at airports around the country went to the dreaded 'blue screen of death' error on Friday afternoon leaving passengers scrambling

Supermarket checkouts ground to a halt as computers failed and stores like this 7-Eleven in Sydney just shut their doors, unable to take purchases

The Crowdstrike outage hit Australia about 3pm AEST, with millions reporting their computers had shut down and showed a 'blue screen of death'.

The company confirmed the outage was a result of a planned upgrade for Microsoft.

CrowdStrike has said it may be able to come to a solution shortly.

The shutdown hit multiple countries including New Zealand, Japan, India, the US and the United Kingdom.

Multiple businesses have been affected including media organisations such as News Corp's global operations, the ABC, SBS, Channel 7, Channel 9 and Network 10. 

It has also hit EFTPOS services, airlines, banks and supermarkets, throwing the entire nation into chaos.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector has listed outages for Foxtel, NAB, Bendigo Bank, Suncorp Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Me Bank.

Telstra, Microsoft, Google, Foxtel, National Australia Bank, ABC, Uber, ANZ, and Bendigo Bank also suffered outages. 

But Qantas, Virgin Australia, Jetstar, police across much of the country and the federal and NSW governments were hit, as well as point-of-sale machines at shops, including Coles and Woolworths.

Flight screens at Sydney Airport and other airports across the country were blank for some time with passengers warned of delays.

While they started working again about 5.30pm, many passengers were unable to board flights with Jetstar reportedly experiencing ongoing problems.

Flights across the country have been cancelled, with Jetstar in particular scrapping all of their flights until 2am on Saturday.

Huge lines at Melbourne airport snaked their way through the terminal as Jetstar computers could not get up and running, with Daily Mail reporter Zak Wheeler caught in the chaos

The outage affected computers across the globe almost instantaneously in what has likely dwarfed Australia previous biggest outage - telco Optus in 2023

Several Coles stores shut and customers were told they could not complete their purchases while others declared 'cash only'

A Virgin Australia spokeswoman said some of its services were likely to be cancelled and others delayed but later added that the airline's  operations remained stable following the impacts. 

'We are working to resolve any delays and get our guests on their way as quickly as possible,' she said.

The outage spread globally, with companies around the world reporting issues and overseas airlines forced to cancel flights after systems crashed.

In Australia, many media organisations have been impacted.

'The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets,' it said in a news story.

Nine and Sky News said its news bulletins were affected.

Even footy fans were being hit, with AFL club Essendon warning them to bring physical tickets so they could get into Marvel Stadium on Friday night.

The Australian National Relay Service confirmed it was working to restore services but said it was able to make triple-zero calls.

A government spokesperson confirmed a meeting of the National Emergency Mechanism had been called by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese just before 6pm AEST, where government and industry leaders were briefed on the situation by Crowdstrike.

Deputy secretary of the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Centre, Hamish Hansford, said in a video shared after the emergency government meeting that Crowdstrike was working on the fix but that it could be 'days' before all the damage is undone.

'Over the next hours and days, we hope that this incident will self-resolve as technical responses kick in. There is no reason to panic, it is not a cybersecurity incident.' 

Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil also attended the meeting which she said was joined by CrowdStrike, which confirmed there was no evidence the outage was a cyber-security incident.

Mr Albanese called an emergency meeting of government leaders on Friday evening 

The Prime Minister said he was working closely with the country's technical agencies

Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil (right with actor Rachel Griffiths at the 2025 Midwinter Ball at Parliament House earlier this month) said the outage was not a cyberattack 

'This is a technical issue, caused by a Crowdstrike update to its customers,' Ms O'Neil said.

'They have issued a fix for this, allowing affected companies and organisations to reboot their systems without the problem.

'CrowdStrike has informed the federal government that most issues should be resolved through the fix, but given the size and nature it may take 'some time' to resolve.

'Governments are closely engaged at all levels, focused on bringing together the affected parties and ensuring government entities institute the fix as quickly as possible,' she said.

Crowdstrike has confirmed the outage is a result of a planned upgrade for Microsoft, and has flagged it may be able to come to a solution shortly.

The Prime Minister has issued a statement, saying he understands Australians are 'concerned about the outage that is unfolding globally and affecting a wide range of services'.

'My Government is working closely with the National Cyber Security Coordinator,' Anthony Albanese said.

CrowdStrike, a $125bn US-listed company, could lose up to $12.5bn in value when the New York markets open later tonight, with shares in the company tanking 10 per cent in pre-market trading.

The company went public in 2019 and has rocketed up in value since then, with its share price climbing from about US$64 to about US$343 before Friday's sudden slump.

Crowdstrike is security software which appears to have clashed with a Windows update 

The company provides cloud-delivered protection of endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data.

Its customers include private sector clients in the corporate world and also government and public service bodies.

'Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, the CrowdStrike Falcon platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence on evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritised observability of vulnerabilities, all through a single, lightweight agent,' the company says on its website.

Microsoft is also trading lower on the news, with the US$3.2 trillion tech behemoth down about 1.4 per cent in pre-market trading.

The federal government activated a National Coordination Mechanism meeting on Friday night which also involved state and territory representatives.