Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and other services in Australia and globally

A global outage that started around 5 a.m. AEDT on Friday has disrupted multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and the AI tool Copilot. Down Detector recorded nearly 130,000 reports of problems across five platforms in 74 countries, with peak reports reaching about 20,000 per minute. By mid-afternoon, Australian reports had fallen to under 3,000, but many users still faced access issues.

Microsoft listed the affected services as Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365, Defender XDR, Planner, To Do, Intune, Defender for Office 365, several Purview functions, Power BI export features, the 365 Apps Admin Centre, Universal Print, and Windows 365 tenants using Purview Customer Key.

In Australia, the Home Affairs Minister said the outage does not appear to be a cyber-attack, but schools, universities, businesses and government agencies reported significant disruptions. The Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation confirmed email problems; ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said the impact was partial. Emergency services assured the public that phone calls to Triple Zero remained unaffected.

Service NSW advised customers to postpone in-person visits and use online channels where possible, noting that some transactions were offline but a priority callback system was in place for urgent matters. Universities in Adelaide and at Charles Sturt reported that Outlook and related services were down, though Teams and Zoom continued to function.

Microsoft has not provided a definitive timeline for full restoration. An update at 2 p.m. indicated that a recent remediation attempt had not succeeded, and the company was exploring alternative workstreams to address traffic imbalances. A later statement at 4 p.m. said multiple teams were engaged to restore service components and return infrastructure to a healthy state.