CS says govt in touch with Microsoft over outages
Chief Secretary Eric Chan on Saturday said the government is closely monitoring ongoing problems caused by Friday's global technology outage involving Microsoft systems.  The tech outage disrupted operations around the world on Friday, including halting flights and causing difficulties for the banking, health and media sectors in many countries. The problems have been blamed on a faulty software update issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Chan stressed that the SAR government's own computers were not affected, but officials were concerned and had been in touch with Microsoft.  Speaking to reporters after attending an event, Chan said his deputy, Warner Cheuk, is monitoring the situation. "The SAR government's computer system is not affected. The problem only affected particular airlines... But we're paying close attention to the incident, and we hope it returns to normal as soon as possible," he said. "This is a problem affecting the whole world and it's an internal issue of the company. Hong Kong is not the only place affected." The Airport Authority said operations at the Hong Kong airport had fully returned to normal on Saturday, with airlines' travellers registration systems restored. That followed the implementation of contingency procedures on Friday, including manual check-ins in some cases. But some flights scheduled for Saturday remained cancelled, including 20 from the Hong Kong Express. Some travellers arrived early at the airport on Saturday, with one getting there four hours ahead of her flight to Fukuoka.  "We were afraid there would be a lot of people at the airport... but it's not the airline's problem, so I won't blame them," she told RTHK. A tourist said his flight, scheduled for Friday night, was delayed for more than 17 hours, and he was furious about the arrangements. "I only found out my flight was delayed after I waited at the airport for two hours. There's no compensation. They only allowed me to cancel the ticket. I'm very unsatisfied. I won't choose this airline anymore," he said.