Australians are suffering through supermarket shortages and chasing money lost in the banking ether after a global IT outage last week that has sparked fresh warnings about brittle supply chains.

Woolworths shoppers saw signs on Monday blaming the recent CloudStrike/Microsoft meltdown for a shortage of eggs on shelves, with a key supplier in New South Wales and Victoria taken out of action.

“Due to a global IT outage, we are experiencing some delays with stock deliveries to our stores,” one Victorian sign read.

It comes just days after Australians were left unable to make digital payments or even withdraw money from accounts as companies around the world were taken out by the CloudStrike outage.

Digital payment systems are now back online, but issues persist, with at least one banking customer that spoke to TND but who wished to remain anonymous, still chasing up a lost funds transfer from Friday, when the outage hit Australia.

University of Technology Sydney associate professor Sanjoy Paul said supply chain problems will be reverberating throughout the economy for days as businesses scramble to recover.

The capacity for an outage at CloudStrike and Microsoft to cascade into a disruption of large swathes of the global economy exposes how fragile supply Australia’s chains are, Paul warned.

“The problem for our businesses is they don’t take these supply chain operations very seriously all the time,” Paul said.

“We’re all reliant on this single industry [IT].”

Sign in a Woolworths store on Monday.

Essential industries crash

Last week’s botched software update at US cyber security company CrowdStrike, which affected Microsoft’s Windows operating system, is being described as the largest IT outage in history.

Essential parts of the economy, including supermarkets, banks, airports and even hospitals, were taken out of action as computers failed to start around the world, wreaking huge havoc.

For some time cash was the only way many could buy food, with Swinburne University professor Steve Worthington saying the episode underscores the necessity of access to hard currency.

“This is a wake-up call for the whole interconnected nature of the software we have,” Worthington said.

“One brick in that wall has collapsed and then the whole thing has fallen over.”

Paul said supply chains are incredibly reliant on a few large software companies, with Microsoft and CrowdStrike being among the biggest keystones in the global network of digital systems.

That concentration is useful because it can make protecting systems easier, with Microsoft touting the security of its software as a key selling point to big businesses around the world.

But that also means the damage is greater if those systems do go offline, Paul explained.

“We need to create alternative systems so that during crises we have back-up plans,” he said.

“Traditional payments are really important because while we’re going through a transformation into the digital world, we’re not fully there yet.

“We need to mistake-proof the system until then.”

Access to cash key

As TND has recently reported, Australians are being warned to expect more disruptions to supply chains in future due to everything from technological issues to workforce shortages.

Cash has also become harder to access for many Australians, particularly vulnerable cohorts of people experiencing exclusion from digital payments in regional and remote parts of the nation.

Worthington said efforts from big banks to pare back cash access – particularly by closing down branches, restricting coin withdrawals and cutting back ATM numbers – risk leaving people caught out when an IT outage occurs.

“This is, of course, an example of this occurring in a [software] technology arena,” Worthington said.

“But it can also happen with telecommunications or power.”