While the world scrambled to find answers, reconnect to servers and calm delayed travellers during a global internet outage last month, Western Australia's Port Hedland International Airport kept on ticking.

On Friday, July 19, at about 3pm AEST, the US-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused a global IT outage after a bad software update. 

The outage impacted banks, airlines, media companies, supermarkets and government agencies across the world.

However, about 1,600 kilometres north of Perth, staff at the Pilbara town's airport, a small but important FIFO hub, had no idea the largest tech outage in history was unfolding.

Chief executive David Batic said as part of a recent terminal redevelopment, new diversity in its IT systems had been installed. 

"It was an additional cloud, apparently we switched to a German-based system," he said.

"We wouldn't have thought that a worldwide outage was possible, but as it turned out the system we had in place actually addressed that issue."

The first sign of trouble globally was when the airport's accountant Rex Fleay, who was visiting from Perth, noticed an issue with his invoicing system that morning.

"I checked out our email and saw that there was some correspondence from the accounting software provider saying it was down and they were working on fixing it," Mr Fleay said. 

"Within that half an hour it was pretty obvious that something significant had gone wrong because we just couldn't log into anything.

Head of Airport Hayley Vale said as other systems failed, the airport seemed to be unscathed.

"I started to get a couple of messages through from some of the providers of our equipment in the terminal asking if we had any issues," Ms Vale said.

"I [was] like, 'We don't have a problem.'

"I'm looking out the window — the car park is still working, the baggage I can see on the CCTV, I can see the terminal, the baggage belt is still working, there are still people being checked in."

The airport hosts freight servicing companies, charter and flight training facilities, a heliport and the Royal Flying Doctor Service super base.

"They weren't aware that we had switched over to a different system."

IT heroes 

Clint Boessen, the technical director of Perth-based Avantgarde Technologies, suggested the switch as a preventative measure.

Many in the IT space have noticed the internet becoming increasingly standardised and homogenous, where a smaller number of very big companies can lead to the fragility of our networks.

He said CrowdStrike is an endpoint protection product, the largest in the world.

Not only was it ubiquitous, but the bad update that caused the outage elsewhere meant each server and workstation had to be manually booted into safe mode to restore devices.