Airline check-ins, most services in S'pore back to normal after IT outage

Some staff had to work overnight to restore systems; authorities to learn from incident

- Osmond Chia

A day after an unprecedented global outage crippled some systems around Singapore on July 19, services islandwide largely returned to normal, including all airline check-in services at Changi Airport.

A handful of services, however, were still bedevilled by technical issues for much of July 20. At Changi Airport, budget airline AirAsia continued work to restore its servers, resulting in snaking queues at its Terminal 4 check-in counters through the morning.

AirAsia staff worked manually to issue boarding passes to keep scores of passengers moving until 2pm, when its systems were finally restored.

Operator Changi Airport Group said at 7pm that check-in processes of all affected airlines were back to normal.

While some offices, apps and public systems from postal services to carpark gantries went offline temporarily on July 19, the chaos was felt most keenly at the airport in the wake of a flawed security update by global cyber-security service provider CrowdStrike.

The US company serves tens of thousands of enterprises worldwide, such as offices, transport networks and hospitals. The disruption affected machines running on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

The impact of the outage continued to reverberate around the world on July 20, even as services from air travel and healthcare to shipping and finance went back online.

Airports in Britain scrambled to deal with hundreds of displaced passengers, while in the US, flights continued to be held up as airlines worked to clear a backlog of cancellations and delays. In Australia, the first nation to report the outage, checkouts at some supermarkets remained unserviceable.