America’s Federal Aviation Administration has issued an urgent directive, requesting that Boeing notify operators of 737 MAX airplanes to conduct additional inspections of the plane’s automated flight control system.

The directive enables Boeing’s recommendation to inspect planes with more than 6,000 flight hours be subject to specific electronic checks to become mandatory.

MCAS, an automated flight control system on the 737 MAX, was tied to two fatal 737 MAX crashes that led to the plane’s 20-month grounding that was lifted in November.

Multiple organisations are slowly coming back online following a global cloud platform outage.

The ANZ, Bank of Melbourne, Westpac and Commonwealth Bank, and Bank West had all reported system issues with their mobile banking apps.

Users had been served with error messages while attempting to log in.

Commonwealth Bank earlier advised its customers they are investigating, so did other major banks.

Airlines offline

There had also been reports that several other websites, including Virgin Australia, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, American Air and Delta Airlines have gone offline.

Allianz Insurance and CMC Markets are affected. ME Bank also reported “server issues”.

Australian website tracker DownDetector displayed an upsurge in access complaints across several major websites around 2:10pm

Ticker News can confirm Telstra and NAB have not been impacted by this outage, despite reports from Down Detector.

The issue was believed to be linked to problems occurring with CDN provider Akamai.

Sites are now coming back online.

A Qantas plane flying between two Australian cities was damaged on the ground before taking to the sky

The plane was loaded with passengers and was flying from Darwin to Brisbane in the country’s North.

But according to NT News, it was flying in the air damaged after a baggage handler drove machinery into the jet before it took off.

Many people were unaware they were on an aircraft that was damaged.

This flight reportedly took off last Saturday but engineers didn’t discover the damage to them until the next day — after it had landed.

Qantas says only paint was taken from the fuselage of the plane but It is believed the damage was caused when a belt loader hit the plane.

The Transport Workers’ Union is now calling on the Federal Transport Minister to begin a multi-agency investigation into Qantas’ safety systems because they are “concerned that passengers and workers lives are being put at risk.”

The worker is understood to have been stood down while an investigation is carried out.