Southern Cross Travel Insurance says it WILL be covering claims following Crowdstrike outage

Southern Cross Travel Insurance says it will be covering claimable losses caused by the Crowdstrike global network outage event, despite its own operations not being affected.

“We will be covering claimable losses caused by this event, provided all other conditions and criteria for cover are met (and subject to any limits, sub-limits and/or any exclusions applying) and advise customers to keep all receipts they may have to make it easier to process a claim,” Southern Cross Travel Insurance CEO Jo McCauley said.

Meanwhile, Australia’s airports have come back online after customers were hit with mass cancellations and delays due to the global network outage.

Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane airports were all reported to be operating as normal, with major carriers, including Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin, able to process most passengers after a reboot to their systems.

A blue screen with the outage alert was all that appeared on computer screens at airports, banks, media and supermarkets, that were among the major Australian businesses thrown into chaos when Microsoft systems were hit by the global IT outage cause by an update by Crowdstrike, an American cybersecurity technology company based.

The airports have urged passengers to allow extra travel time as delays may persist. But airline passengers impacted by the global outage today are unlikely to be entitled to flight delay compensation as it will almost certainly be considered an extraordinary event.

So says the CEO of Swiipr, Tara Spielhagen, which provides airlines with digital disruption payments systems that allow customers to instantly be credited funds during delays.

“Passengers impacted by the global outage today are unlikely to be entitled to flight delay compensation as it will almost certainly be considered an extraordinary event, being something that was outside an individual airline’s control,” she said.

“However, in the UK and other European countries, passengers are still entitled to assistance during extended delays even in such circumstances, for example the provision of food and drink while they wait for their journey. In many other countries including the US, airlines also have to provide assistance to their passengers under their terms and conditions.

Launched in 2020, Swiipr is used by 26 airlines across 70 countries, including a major flag carrier whose 4,000 staff are utilising the platform in over 167 of its airports globally.

Swiipr is a provider of airline compensation payments, enabling airlines to provide physical and mobile card payouts for items such as food and drinks to passengers whose journeys have been interrupted.

“Swiipr’s systems have not been impacted by today’s outage and we’ve been working overtime today assisting our airline partners to provide compensation to passengers stuck at airports all over the world,” Spielhagen said.

“Swiipr has today (Friday) seen a more than 200 per cent increase in compensation payouts compared with a normal day, and this continues to spike. We expect this to continue over the weekend as today’s events will have a knock-on effect on airlines.

“Our systems are digital and provide funds that can be used at any outlet in and outside of an airport, rather than being restricted to a select few retailers and/or linked to a paper voucher or barcode. Therefore, passengers of airlines using Swiipr would still have been able to use their funds somewhere because although some airport outlets were affected by the outage, others were not.”

Crowdstrike, the company behind the failed network update is based in Austin, Texas. The shutdown affected Australian companies significantly as it occurred during business hours.

“On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems,” the company stated.

“Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform.

“This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems.”

More than 23,000 companies are subscribed to CrowdStrike, with the estimated number of computers affected in the millions. It also stated it was not a cyberattack.