University of Melbourne lecturer in cyber security Shaanan Cohney says there appear to be two separate things happening at once to cause the mass outages we are seeing.

The first issue, he says, appears to have been caused by a piece of software developed by a company called CrowdStrike.

“It’s a computer security vendor that provides a monitoring service to large enterprises so they can see on computers within their control if there’s any indications of suspicious activity or things that would require a security alert or to lock down the computer,” Dr Cohney says.

“Because this software needs to see everything that is going on, it’s very tightly integrated into the computer’s software, so when you install it, it asks for a lot of permissions so that it can ask for everything going on on the computer.

“However, because it’s in such a privileged position, if something goes wrong with it, if there’s a programming mistake it has the capability to bring down the entire computer.

“If someone makes the wrong type of mistake it can bring the whole system down.

“As far as we can tell what it looks like happened with this piece of software is the company issued a significant update and something in the update went wrong.

“Engineers at the company and those outside are scrambling to try to pinpoint the source so they can try to pinpoint the problem so that’s why companies are telling their employees to shut down their computer in order to prevent them from updating so those employees can maintain some minimal capabilities and have access to documents that are offline.”

Reporting by Andi Yu