Microsoft outage live: Outlook and Teams failures impact government agencies, schools and businesses
A global Microsoft 365 outage has impacted nearly 130,000 users worldwide, with email systems and productivity software including Outlook and Teams experiencing failures.
Australia's federal police and security services were among the organizations affected by the Microsoft outage, according to agency heads. The federal home affairs minister, Tony Burke, stated that Microsoft's Australian leadership believes the outage was triggered by an update issue rather than a cyber attack.
The perspective of Microsoft at this stage, they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event. They believe that they're dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has that has gone awry.
Global Impact
Microsoft confirmed that a streamlined recovery process is underway to resolve the global outage, which has affected nearly 130,000 users worldwide. Down Detector showed a significant spike in reports of issues affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and enterprise services like SharePoint and OneDrive.
Many users reported being unable to send or receive emails, or experiencing trouble loading their inboxes. While new reports have decreased from the peak, the company faces challenges as some servers have become unresponsive again when traffic returns.
Government Response
Australian federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett and Asio director general Mike Burgess confirmed their systems had been affected by the outage. Burgess noted that Asio's systems "operate on multiple levels" and were impacted "on one level, yes, but not completely."
Burke highlighted that while Microsoft reported the impact was largely on email systems, the CrowdStrike incident had led to significant "downstream impacts" on various products, suggesting potential broader consequences.
Sector-Wide Disruptions
Sources in the Australian public service confirmed some services were affected on Friday morning. Schools, courts, and businesses across multiple states reported disruptions to their email systems and administrative functions.
Schoolbytes, a cloud-based administration platform used by New South Wales schools, was "temporarily" unable to access emails, forcing communication to shift to phone calls. Courts in South Australia and Victoria also reported email system failures.
Recovery Challenges
Microsoft is working to resolve the issue by limiting which types of traffic can reach affected servers and rolling back to an earlier software configuration on some systems. The company is analyzing diagnostic data to determine what's causing servers to become unresponsive when traffic returns.
Australians began reporting issues just before 5am AEST, with problems peaking at 9.22am when over 5,500 reports were filed. Microsoft has not provided a definitive timeline for full restoration of services.
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