SEPANG, July 20 — Indonesian man Daryanto Sabeer, 63, was en route to Riau, Indonesia when the world plunged into digital standstill from the CrowdStrike outage.
Daryanto, with three of his family members took off from Padang, Indonesia, and when they landed at Kuala Lumpur International Airport’s (KLIA) Terminal 2 (T) for transit, things were already looking hectic.
“Now I’m waiting for the unknown. We reached here about 2pm and the staff told us that there was a system error and they are working on it. Any new information, they said they will keep us posted.
“But it’s been five and a half hours, I’ve been sitting here and my niece is queuing up to check for our flight to Riau,” he related to Malay Mail with a disappointed tone.
Daryanto was not the only one who went through this the first time, as a global outage of IT operations running on Microsoft-based systems has resulted in major travel disruptions worldwide due to a faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike.
The outage forced airline passengers to check in manually instead of online, with booking systems mostly down.
Flight boarding pass were also issued with handwritten details.
Low-cost airlines AirAsia was more affected by it than Malaysia Aviation Group’s Malaysia Airlines and Firefly Airline, which caused operations in T2 much more disrupted.
A customer service officer at the T2 airport told Malay Mail that the disruption started about 12pm.
“I’ve been standing here since then until now to help passengers direct them to which counter they should go, navigating the crowd, and some came at us upset. But we told them that this is a worldwide issue, not just us,” they said.
The officer, who wished to remain anonymous said those who checked-in manually for their Air Asia flights prior to coming to the airport are safe.
“They can just bring their bag in, and a counter inside will sort the baggage. They don’t need to check-in their luggages,” they said.
It was all hands on deck during the outage as Air Asia and airport office staff are seen on the ground helping their staff.
Zuhrah N. Alassan, 40 drove all the way from Terengganu this morning to send her mom’s worker, Saidalavi Kulathingal Thodi, 38 back to Kerala, India.
“So his flight is at 9.15pm, when we reached here at about 4.30pm, it was chaotic. They told us to line up at the Y row counters and so we did, but it turned out to be for those who missed their flights. So we queued up in a different row.
“It took us three hours to get the manually checked-in ticket, lucky we arrive here early,” she said while lining up to check-in Saidavi’s luggages.
Some of the travellers who spoke to Malay Mail said they knew about the outage before heading to the airport, but travel had to go on.
In response, they had to arrive much earlier than usual — with one group saying they still had more than three hours to go.
Yesterday, the National Cyber Security Agency (Nacsa) said it is actively monitoring the situation and working closely with relevant stakeholders to mitigate the impact and restore operations as swiftly as possible.
Nacsa said aid the impact of this outage on Malaysia is considerable as it has caused delays and operational challenges across multiple sectors, affecting both businesses and the public.
