PETALING JAYA: Digital minister Gobind Singh Deo says the government is monitoring the situation following today’s global IT outage which disrupted the operations of several businesses, including airlines.
"We have received reports of disruptions which are being fixed. All steps are being taken to deal with the problem and solve it soon," Gobind said in a post on X, in response to a Bernama report which stated that the outage affecting Microsoft-based systems appeared to have impacted operations at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
Earlier, Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd said that no local airport had been affected by the global IT outage although some of its airline partners were experiencing disruptions.
Malaysia Aviation Group said Malaysia Airlines was not affected by the system outage, and no flights had been cancelled or delayed.
However, it said Firefly’s booking and online check-in systems had been affected and that the airline was working closely with its service provider to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
According to Bernama, airports in Penang and Sabah experienced flight disruptions, resulting in long queues at counters for manual check-in.
The news agency quoted Penang’s tourism and creative economy committee chairman Wong Hon Wai as saying that as at 5.30pm, at least 11 flights were delayed departing from Penang International Airport.
Wong said the flights were from Penang to Kuching, Langkawi, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Jakarta.
State infrastructure, transportation and digital committee chairman Zairil Khir Johari said the situation was under control although there had been some flight delays involving AirAsia.
In Sabah, there were also long queues at the check-in areas at the Kota Kinabalu International Airport and Tawau Airport.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s CEO, George Kurtz, said the issue stemmed from a defect found in a single content update for Microsoft Windows hosts.
He said it was neither a security incident nor a cyberattack, adding that the issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix had been deployed.
