By Nqobile Dludla
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -Services of South African lenders Capitec Bank and Absa and airline Airlink have been fully restored after experiencing disruptions early on Friday, the companies said, as a software update wreaked havoc on computer systems globally.
A software update by global cyberscurity firm CrowdStrike appeared to have triggered systems problems that grounded flights, forced some broadcasters off air and left customers without access to services such as healthcare or banking.
Capitec said it experienced significant disruptions across all of its banking channels early in the morning because of CrowdStrike.
“Importantly, we want to reassure our clients that their bank accounts and personal data remain secure and unaffected by this incident,” the lender said in an emailed response to questions.
The South African bank of Absa Group said in a post on X that its digital banking channels, point-of-sale services and ATMs are all functional and access to its rewards hub is now restored.
“As at 1 p.m. today, the global third-party IT issue had limited impact on Absa customer services … The issue is well contained currently,” Absa Group, which also operates across Africa, said in an emailed response to questions.
With airlines, state-owned South African Airways said in a post on X that it was experiencing an intermittent technical outage at its contact centre, meaning that customers contacting the airline for new bookings, changes, or ancillary purchases will experience a longer hold time.
Privately-owned regional airline, Airlink also informed its customers in a post on X that despite the outage, which affected its entire IT network, including telephone lines, its flights are running on schedule.
“Our systems are up and running again,” it said in an update.
Customers of FlySafair were struggling to pay for flights with their bank cards on its website, with the low-cost airline responding on X that “we are currently having payment issues due to the Microsoft outage.”
Airports Company South Africa, which owns and operates South Africa’s nine principal airports, said in a statement that it does not use CrowdStrike services and therefore its “airport network remains unaffected by this outage with operations running as normal”.
(Additional reporting by Bhargav AcharyaEditing by David Goodman, Louise Heavens and David Evans)
