Canberra blood bank hit by IT outage

Computer systems around the world went offline when major cyber security firm CrowdStrike undertook a defective software update.

Canberrans reported chaos while grocery shopping, visiting the bank or trying to catch a flight.

Blood donations were even impacted.

Kevin McGregor said he was turned away from the Civic Lifeblood plasma donation centre on Friday.

"They weren't able to take my donation," Mr McGregor said.

"I ended up having to call up this morning to make sure that they weren't still out because there was no notification that said they were back up."

The Belconnen resident said he returned to donate on Saturday, but the incident reminded him how interconnected the world was.

"It's amazing how vulnerable we really are," he said.

A Lifeblood spokesperson said "centres were minimally impacted by the outage".

"Our donor centres remained open and our staff continued to collect blood and plasma donations for patients. For a short period, donor centres did use paper questionnaires instead of the electronic donor questionnaire," they said.

"Civic Donor Centre was minimally impacted by the outage. The centre remained open and continued to welcome donors, who may have experienced some delays as the team moved to paper questionnaires."

They said the Garran Donor centres needs donors with A and O-type blood, and the Civic donor centre has many plasma appointments available this week.

While some flights were cancelled on Friday, a Canberra Airport spokesperson said that by Saturday they were leaving and landing on schedule.

One person took to social media on Friday afternoon to warn Canberrans away from Westfield Belconnen.

"[It] is absolute chaos. So many people needing groceries and money. Do not recommend going there," they wrote.

Most issues were resolved by Saturday.

Most of the major shops at the Canberra Centre were not affected on Friday evening.

On Saturday, Canberra Centre said while all shops were open some were only accepting cash.

Coles said that all supermarkets were trading but some liquor shops were closed.

"Some registers may be temporarily unavailable while we fully recover. We are putting on additional team members to assist customers with their shopping, and we thank everyone for their patience," they said.

A Woolworths spokesperson said some checkouts were still affected by the outage.

"We have plenty of stock on hand," they said.

"Following some disruption to a small number of orders last night, our online system is operating as normal."

ACT police and Emergency Services Agency ACT said they had not been affected by the outages.

Emergency services had been worried some fire alarms in office and apartment blocks might not be communicating with their services but that concern had been lifted by midday Saturday.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil warned Australians to be wary of scammers taking advantage of the outage.

"What has happened here is an IT outage that has been caused by an error in an update provided by a company which provides cyber security software for most major economies around the world," she said.

"[It is a] very serious incident for the Australian economy."