The worldwide computer outage traced back to US-based firm CrowdStrike affected plenty of businesses in New Zealand, one of which was Partners Life.
Following the outage that surfaced late Friday 19 July, the insurer issued a statement saying it successfully made commission payments on Saturday. While payments were made, commission statements were incorrect, something the company went on to fix.
“Our team has done an amazing job to rectify the commission statements and are currently working to upload the correct statements.”
Law firm Russell McVeagh published a commentary exploring avenues for redress against CrowdStrike. It stated that while contractual redress is limited, claims – such as negligence – may be considered.
The law firm also referred to the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill announced last week in the UK that seeks to avoid situations such as the CrowdStrike crisis.
“We will watch with interest to see how the New Zealand Government and regulators in affected sectors here in Aotearoa respond,” said the firm.
“Questions may also be raised as to whether the large multi-national organisations most severely impacted by the outage had sufficiently robust contingency and continuity plans in place, and whether they were sufficiently prepared to implement them in response to an outage of this nature and scale.”