Australia grapples with nationwide Microsoft 365 outage affecting schools, courts and government services

A worldwide Microsoft 365 outage began affecting Australian users just before 5 a.m. AEST on Friday, causing Outlook email and Teams messaging to become unavailable. Reports peaked at 9:22 a.m. with more than 5,500 complaints, according to Down Detector, before gradually declining.

Microsoft said it had no indication of a cyber-attack and suggested the problem stemmed from a configuration change that overloaded some servers, taking them offline. An update on the company’s website noted that remediation efforts were not progressing as expected.

Government agencies responded by urging customers to postpone in-person visits. Service NSW activated a priority callback system for urgent transactions and advised users to complete services online where possible.

"Some transactions in Service Centres and Call Centres are unavailable at this time," the agency said.

Federal Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation director-general Mike Burgess appeared together at a press conference, confirming that their respective systems had been impacted. Burgess added that the agency’s systems operate on multiple levels and were affected “on one level, yes, but not completely.”

The Australian Medical Association reported that some hospitals and clinics reverted to paper prescriptions because multi-factor authentication for prescribing software required access to Microsoft-supported email. AMA president Dr Michael Bonning emphasized that patient care was not compromised and that workarounds were in place.

"We’ve had some facilities return to using paper for scripts because authentication … requires you to be able to access your Microsoft-supported email," Bonning said.

School administration platform Schoolbytes in New South Wales temporarily lost email access, prompting schools to request parents contact them by phone for urgent matters.

Courts in South Australia and Victoria experienced email disruptions, though Victoria’s county court said scheduled hearings would proceed as planned.

The outage also triggered a scam warning from the National Cyber Security Coordinator, who urged Australians to be cautious of unsolicited communications and to verify any unexpected links or attachments.

"I encourage every Australian to remain vigilant and be cautious of unsolicited contact. Do not click on unexpected links, open attachments, or provide personal information. If you’re unsure, hang up and call back," the coordinator posted.

Coles confirmed its internal email system was affected, while its retail stores continued operating normally. The National Broadband Network reported no impact.

Mark Gregory, an associate professor at RMIT University, explained that the incident appeared to involve a misconfiguration in Microsoft’s network layer, causing a reduced pool of servers to become overloaded and leading to a cascading failure.

"If you lose part of that pool, then all of the users are trying to access the remaining servers, and that overloads them… then it takes time to find the underlying problem: in this case, a misconfiguration in the network layer," Gregory said.