Microsoft outage disrupts Australian businesses and government services
A major Microsoft 365 outage has disrupted businesses, government agencies and other organisations across Australia, knocking out access to Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and related cloud services.
More than 4,400 Australian Outlook outage reports had been logged by 8:20am AEDT on Friday, while global Outlook reports peaked above 120,000.
The Bureau of Meteorology said its forecasts and warnings remained available, although email contact could be affected.
Microsoft said a number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable after failing automated health checks, increasing the load on remaining infrastructure.
The company paused deployments and configuration changes, restarted affected servers and redirected traffic as it worked to restore capacity. By around 10am AEDT, some servers had been returned to service and were remaining stable, although full recovery had not yet been confirmed.
Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator is monitoring the incident.
The outage highlights the operational risk created by the heavy dependence of Australian businesses and government services on a small number of global cloud providers.
