Australia's cybersecurity chief investigating Microsoft outage - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation
A widespread outage has hit Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, with many users unable to access email accounts as the national cyber security coordinator investigates.
Australians are reporting problems accessing Microsoft's email and other online services, as the national cyber security coordinator looks into the outage. Businesses, government agencies and other organisations have been brought to a standstill as they wait to regain access to their email and other connected systems.
Microsoft said users could have trouble connecting to several of its Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Teams and SharePoint. "We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online," a Microsoft spokesperson told the ABC.
Online outage reporting service Downdetector Australia recorded more than 4,400 reports of problems with Outlook by 8:20am on Friday. A spokesperson for the home affairs minister said the National Cyber Security Coordinator, Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, was aware of the outage and looking into it.
Growing reliance on cloud providers
University of Melbourne associate professor Adel Toosi said the widespread disruption was the downside of a growing reliance on a handful of major cloud service providers. Professor Toosi said centralising services by using cloud computing providers like Microsoft was often cheaper because of the economies of scale, but also meant there was less redundancy if an error occurred.
If all of them are failing, nothing can be done
Microsoft working on solution
Microsoft said it had tested an alternative way to check the health of some affected servers, allowing those machines to return to service. It was applying the change more broadly and preparing an automated process to detect and restart servers that stopped responding.
An update from Microsoft said some servers had become unresponsive and may involve a component that's supposed to check whether their services are healthy. The company is investigating recent configuration changes as possible contributors to the problem. In an update issued at 8:41am AEDT, Microsoft said it was continuing to restart and check affected servers before returning them to service.
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