Microsoft outage hits Australian courts, schools and agencies including AFP and ASIO
A global Microsoft 365 failure disrupted email and Teams across Australia and Asia, with Hong Kong bankers among those forced to work offline.
A global Microsoft outage has disrupted Australian courts, schools, universities and government agencies, with the Australian Federal Police and ASIO among those affected, SBS News reported.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told reporters on Friday morning he had spoken with National Cyber Security Coordinator Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness and Microsoft Australia and New Zealand president Jane Livesey. He said the problem was centred "very much on email systems" and that Microsoft believed it was dealing with "an update that has gone awry", comparing it to the CrowdStrike outage of July 2024.
SBS reported that governments in the ACT, Tasmania and Western Australia had been hit. Service NSW said some transactions were unavailable and asked customers to delay visits or go online where they could. Courts in South Australia and Victoria said operations were affected, and the Northern Territory Department of Education reported technical problems in schools. Charles Sturt University and Macquarie University told staff and students multifactor authentication was also affected.
In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reported that the Outlook failure disrupted work in the financial sector, with some bank staff working offline. Bankers at Goldman Sachs and Nomura told the Post their work had been affected. "We haven't been able to send or receive emails since the early hours of this morning, and the problem is still ongoing," a Nomura source said.
Microsoft's own explanation has focused on server capacity. It told users on X that a portion of its infrastructure was under "elevated load" across multiple regions, The Hindu reported, and said it had paused all deployments and was moving traffic off affected servers. Al Jazeera reported the company said servers were failing automatic health checks, putting pressure on those still running. SBS quoted Microsoft as saying a core process on the affected servers was "becoming overwhelmed".
Alex Potanin, an associate professor in computer science at the Australian National University, told SBS that as some servers dropped offline, others "started picking up a lot more slack and getting overloaded". He said it might take "a few more hours" before they returned.
Outage tracker Downdetector recorded about 130,000 Outlook reports in the United States shortly after 1pm US Eastern Time, Al Jazeera and The Hindu reported. Al Jazeera said that fell to about 77,000 just before 3pm, while The Hindu put it at about 37,000 by 6pm. The Hindu said Downdetector had logged problems in 74 countries and territories. Teams, Copilot, OneDrive and SharePoint were among the services affected.
Microsoft said shortly after 6pm Eastern Time that it was "observing limited recovery". SBS reported the company had briefly said it was "seeing positive results" from restarting infrastructure before removing that line from its updates. Microsoft has not said when full service will return, and its next update is expected later on Friday afternoon.
Sources: SBS News, Microsoft’s short-lived optimism as 'update gone awry' hits Australian agencies; South China Morning Post, Microsoft Outlook outage disrupts workers in Hong Kong’s financial sector; The Hindu, Microsoft 365 outage drags on as company observes ‘limited recovery’; Al Jazeera, Microsoft outage hits tens of thousands of users.
