Australian organisations lost most of Friday to a global Microsoft 365 outage that stopped Outlook loading and delayed email across the world, iTnews reports. Microsoft first acknowledged the problem at 4.54am AEDT, and recovery only began at about 10pm, starting with parts of its Asia Pacific infrastructure.
What broke
Microsoft said a portion of its servers became “unexpectedly unavailable”, straining the rest. It traced the fault to a core process on affected servers that became overwhelmed, causing a loss of capacity.
Services that depend on Exchange Online were hit hardest. Microsoft’s status updates, as reported by iTnews and Business Standard, listed:
- Outlook on web, desktop and mobile, plus delayed email delivery
- Copilot access to mail, calendars and files
- Teams calendars and meeting scheduling, though core chat and meetings largely kept working
- Parts of SharePoint Online, Intune, Purview, Defender and Power BI
Early fixes, including a configuration change and server rebuilds, didn’t hold because restored servers became unresponsive again once traffic returned. Microsoft paused all internal deployments while it worked on the problem.
Government steps in
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Australia’s “digital resilience” agreement with Microsoft had been activated to get “appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests”. Business Standard, citing the BBC, reported that Service NSW asked customers to delay visits to service centres and transact online where possible.
No sign of an attack
Microsoft said it had no evidence of malicious activity and promised a full post-incident report with the root cause. It has temporarily extended its email timeout window to 48 hours so delayed messages aren’t lost as the backlog clears.
