Michelle Rimmer from the ABC’s London bureau says the outage is having widespread impacts globally on industries ranging from transport to infrastructure and even healthcare.
“Across Europe, at airports in Spain, in Germany, there have been incidents that have been reported at almost all of the airports. They’ve had to revert to manual operations just to try and keep things running at this stage,” she told News Channel.
“The German government has said that critical infrastructure and operators have been impacted.
“The Paris Olympic Committee have released a statement saying that they’ve been affected as well, however, they have contingencies in place to make sure that they can continue with their planning and preparations ahead of the opening ceremony in just one week’s time.
“Poland has said that its main shipping container terminal is struggling to keep up with any incoming ship loads — it’s asked to not have any more containers dropped off.
“So we’re really seeing broad impacts across a range of industries across Europe.”
She says the outage is even leading to healthcare delays in the UK, where hospitals and GP surgeries are currently “only able to treat some of the most urgent cases”.
“That’s because they can’t access medical records,” she says.
“So they’re reverting back to pen and paper to make sure that the most urgent emergency cases are still being seen, but others have been delayed.”
