Nigeria’s IT space not impacted by global outage — ngCERT

The Nigeria Computer and Emergency Response Team (ngCERT), the country’s internet police unit under the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), has disclosed that there hasn’t been any reported outage of IT services in Nigeria.

ngCERT said this on the heels of a global IT outage on Friday that grounded activities in at least the US, UK, India, Australia, and New Zealand. In a tweet, the country’s internet police said, “ngCERT is aware of the global IT outage affecting various services and platforms.

“So far, we have not received any reports of impact on our cyberspace. We will issue an advisory as soon as valid information is available. Please report any noticed impacts for prompt action.”

Read also: Cyberattack not responsible for global IT outage — CrowdStrike CEO

On Friday, a Microsoft outage affected companies worldwide, with planes grounded and train services shut down. The service outage left users unable to access Microsoft cloud computing platforms and caused airlines to cancel flights. Downdetector.com, a website that tracks service disruptions, reported that thousands of users worldwide had problems with Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Most of the downtime was with OneDrive, server connections, and Outlook. This outage impacted Sky News in the UK, which could not broadcast live TV on Friday morning, and airlines in the US. The extent of the service disruption is not yet known; however, according to BusinessTech in South Africa, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange issued a notice stating that the FTSE indices are not updating.

Read also: How Microsoft configuration change caused global IT outage

According to news outlets in Australia, airlines, telecommunications providers, banks, and media broadcasters were disrupted as they lost access to computer systems. Airlines in India also reported problems, and some New Zealand banks reportedly went offline.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has disclosed that this outage was not a security incident or cyberattack. According to Microsoft, a configuration change in some Microsoft Azure backend workloads caused interruptions between storage and compute resources, resulting in connectivity failures and affecting downstream Microsoft 365 services.