Operations at the Solaire Resort & Casino (pictured), at Entertainment City in Manila, were partially affected on Friday, GGRAsia has learnt, coinciding with a massive technology failure that disrupted the functioning of millions of computers across the world. The property is run by Philippine casino developer and promoter Bloomberry Resorts Corp.
According to checks, a number of computers at Solaire Resort – including in the casino – were displaying blue-coloured ‘error’ screens on Friday. Operations at the property were gradually resuming in the evening that day, according to sources.
GGRAsia approached Bloomberry for clarification regarding the impact on its operations, but had not received a reply by the time this story went online.
It was not clear if the outage had also affected the hotel operations at Solaire Resort.
There was also no clarity on whether operations at Solaire Resort North, a Bloomberry casino complex in Quezon City that opened in late May, had been affected by the global Microsoft Windows outage.
The massive technology failure reported on Friday caused chaos around the world, with services in various sectors badly hit. A number of businesses in the Philippines, including banks and airlines, were affected by the outage, with flights cancelled and some banking services temporarily offline.
Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc acknowledged that the problem was caused by an update to its antivirus software, which was designed to protect Windows devices from malicious attacks.
Microsoft has estimated that CrowdStrike’s faulty update “affected 8.5 million Windows devices”, and that it could take some time to fix completely the issue.
Credit rating agency Morningstar DBRS said in a recent note that Friday’s widespread disruption affected a variety of corporate and financial sectors globally, which could “lead to increased costs for a number of businesses”.
“While the impact is acute in a number of sectors, we do not expect it to have a lasting effect,” stated Elisabeth Rudman, managing director at Morningstar.
“However, we expect the incident to raise regulatory questions about the oligopolistic nature of critical IT infrastructure globally,” she added.
