Croatia not experiencing difficulties caused by global tech failure

ZAGREB, 20 July (Hina) – The Ministry of Justice, Administration and Digital Transformation said on Friday that the state-owned IT infrastructure was not affected by the technological failure that caused the collapse of IT systems across the world, for which responsibility was claimed by the CrowdStrike company.

“The Shared Services Centre is operating properly, as are the systems of service providers APIS, Fina and AKD. The Ministry of Justice, Administration and Digital Transformation, in cooperation with all stakeholders, will continue to monitor the situation and will inform the public in a timely manner of any changes in the state IT infrastructure system,” the ministry said in a press release.

Bernard Gršić, state secretary at the ministry, said that Croatia has its own infrastructure that uses Microsoft technologies as well as other anti-virus protection tools that are not affected by the failure.

The central health information system (CEZIH) also crashed this morning, but has been restored. This system is currently undergoing an upgrade and its failure was unrelated to the global issue, Gršić said.

As for air traffic, Gršić said that Croatian Air Traffic Control was fully operational. “There were some minor administrative difficulties, but they have been resolved,” he said.

Defence Minister Ivan Anušić confirmed in an interview with N1 television that his ministry had no problems in its work. “We use other systems that are not affected by these failures,” he said.

Airlines, airports on at least four continents, healthcare systems, banks, telecoms, media and other companies, institutions and organisations across the world were experiencing difficulties in their work on Friday due to a major computer failure that crashed their systems.

The cause of the failure was the Falcon Sensor software of the cyber security company CrowdStrike, which has claimed responsibility.

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted. This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. (…) Our team is fully mobilized to ensure the security and stability of CrowdStrike customers,” CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz wrote on the X platform.