The financial costs of Australian banks, supermarkets, airports and many other businesses are expected to be tallied by economists over the coming days.
The outage resulted from an error in a software upgrade by . While businesses are mostly up and running again, many could not operate for hours.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil on Saturday said the impact on Australian businesses was "significant" and some were in a "recovery phase."
So how much damage did the incident cause to Australia's economy?
Economies brought to a standstill by outages
Throughout the outage, many businesses including retailers and supermarkets, were forced to either close or operate in a limited capacity.
Many transactions, such as via EFTPOS, online orders, or self-serve checkouts, simply could not take place. Some businesses had to rely on paper receipts, faced with the inability to process transactions on computers.
Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP, said an economy increasingly reliant on IT, meant if such systems were shut down, the economy shut down too.
"It's a bit like the flow of blood through the human body ... if we cut off the blood flow through a human body, it disrupts everything from working (and) it's the same with the economy," he said.
"If you cut off the IT system, it stops the flow of transactions and money through the economy and that causes the economy to seize up."
How significant was the economic impact?
When asked how significant the economic impacts would be, O'Neil said there would be conversations about the costs to companies and consumers in the coming days.
"What I would say is that this has been a very serious incident for the Australian economy," she said.
"This is a really significant incident that's occurred here, and there will be a long run of discussions about what we've learned and who is ultimately culpable."
Oliver said while it would be difficult to estimate the cost to Australia as yet, it could be "in the billions of dollars".
However, he said some factors were mitigated, and that while there was a "huge cost" to businesses, the overall impact on things like retail sales and GDP might not be as high as initially thought.
"It did occur on a Friday afternoon when some people were shutting down anyway, so it's not as if it occurred early in the morning and affected the whole day," he said.
"The other aspect is that a lot of activity that was disrupted will have occurred anyway ... things that were going to happen just got delayed."
Tim Harcourt, professor and chief economist at the UTS Institute for Public Policy, agreed with this assessment, and said while there was significant short-term disruption, long-term economic damage was unlikely.
"When it's very short, a short-term disruption is fixed pretty quickly (and) it doesn't do much long-term economic damage," he said.
"It's disruptive obviously for customers stranded at the airport and so on. So it's annoying, but it's not significant economic-wise."
Harcourt said when retail stores and supermarkets were closed, many customers would simply have delayed their shopping by a day or two.
"A lot of the consumption would just be adjusted for a couple of days, so it wouldn't be that bad an impact," he said.
Australian banks, retail stores, airlines and media companies were hit by the major IT outage. Source: AAP / Lukas Coch
But Australian Chamber of Commerce chief executive Andrew McKellar said businesses were unlikely to receive money for the loss in productivity.
"For many businesses, it's going to be very difficult to secure direct compensation, but obviously, that's something that should be looked at," he told reporters in Canberra.
"If there are ways to consider how that might be evaluated, then obviously that's something that should be on the table.
"It is a reminder, regrettably, for a lot of businesses this is going to be water under the bridge, it's going to be a learning experience."
What impact did the outage have on the stock market?
As the outage took place towards the end of the trading day in Australia — roughly an hour before the Australian Securities Exchange closes — the local market was less impacted than the US.
CrowdStrike shares slid 11.1 per cent, while rival cybersecurity firms Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne advanced 2.2 per cent and 7.8 per cent, respectively.
All three major US stock indexes ended in negative territory, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffering the worst of it.
Oliver said the downturn in the US market was likely due to a number of factors, not just the IT outage, including a rotation away from tech stocks, investors becoming increasingly wary about and concern that stocks might have run too far.
Will there be long-term economic effects?
Harcourt said he does not expect long-term effects for the Australian economy, as long as no threats to national security emerge.
"In a year's time it won't be seen as that significant unless it gets dragged out," he said.
"So it does seem like something we can deal with, but obviously very hard for the small businesses."
Jetstar passengers wait as check-in kiosks are closed due to a global IT outage at the Gold Coast Airport. Source: AAP / Farid Farid
He said the situation had shown Australia's systems were vulnerable and not set up with backup options.
"We're just trusting that everything is going to work," he said.
"Looking to the future, this will happen more and more; we will have errors and they will affect systems. And hopefully what we will change is the impact of it happening — we will have plan Bs in place."
Additional reporting by the Australian Associated Press
