PHILIPPINE carriers and banks that had warned of service disruptions following last Friday’s global tech outage said that their systems were now back to normal.
Airlines were the most visibly affected, particularly budget carriers Cebu Pacific and Air Asia Philippines, which were forced to cancel several flights after a faulty Microsoft Windows security update brought down IT systems worldwide.
Local banks that had reported technical issues, meanwhile, included the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), Metropolitan Bank and Trust Co. (Metrobank), BDO Unibank, Union Bank of the Philippines and state-owned Land Bank of the Philippines.
In a Facebook post, Ayala-led BPI informed users that they can “resume your everyday banking transactions” and that the outage should not cause “any concern.” Metrobank and BDO likewise said that all their online bank channels had been restored and were accessible.
UnionBank said that its customer service hotline and services were “now in normal operation,” while LandBank said that all its digital channels were back online.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has directed all affected BSP-Supervised Financial Institutions (BSFIs) to provide updates and implement their resilience and continuity plans as needed.
Cebu Pacific, meanwhile, said that all systems had been restored as of early morning on Sunday.
“Cebu Pacific is pleased to announce that we have fully restored our systems following a global IT outage that affected airlines and businesses worldwide,” it said in an advisory.
“Our technology provider Navitaire has completed restoring all its services and its underlying servers to full capacity,” Cebu Pacific added.
“All systems are now operational, and we plan to operate our normal flight schedules. We are grateful to our IT and airport staff, who worked tirelessly to resolve the situation. We also appreciate the patience and understanding shown by our passengers during this challenging time.”
Air Asia, which on Saturday warned that full restoration of services could take some time, also announced that their systems were back online as well yesterday.
“As of 2:00 pm… all systems are now back online. We ask for patience among our guests, as we recover from multiple delays and cancellations as a result of the global IT outage that happened on Friday that was beyond our control,” Air Asia said in a separate advisory.
Philippine Airlines, meanwhile, on Friday said that it was not affected by the outage but was monitoring the situation.
Local telcos PLDT Inc., Globe Telecom Inc. and DITO Telecommunity have reported that they were not affected at all or that the impact was limited to areas not directly linked to their core services.
The global tech failure has been traced to a flawed security update delivered by US firm Crowdstrike for Microsoft Windows users.
The automatic update to the Falcon sensor software, which was supposed to make systems more secure against threats from the internet, instead crashed those systems. Users trying to reboot ended up encountering what is commonly known as the “blue screen of death.”
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