Microsoft outage disrupts Australian schools, hospitals and government services
A widespread Microsoft 365 outage is affecting email and collaboration tools across Australian schools, health facilities and government agencies, though patient care and frontline services remain largely unaffected.
A Microsoft 365 outage is causing email and collaboration disruptions for schools, hospitals and government agencies across Australia. The Western Australia government confirmed that administrative email and staff tools at schools are impacted, but classroom teaching continues as normal and paper-based exams are proceeding.
The Victorian government warned residents to be cautious of scammers exploiting the outage and said no major issues have been reported in frontline emergency response, clinical care or public transport. The Australian Medical Association noted that some hospitals have reverted to paper scripts due to multi-factor authentication problems, but patient care is unaffected. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners reported that while email systems are down, patient safety has not been compromised.
Service NSW advised customers to postpone visits to its centres and use online channels where possible, noting that some transactions are unavailable. The ACT government said its Digital Canberra team is identifying affected systems and applying mitigations, with business continuity measures in place.
Microsoft said the outage stems from an overwhelmed process that establishes secure connections on its servers. The company is preparing a configuration change and will test it on a subset of servers before broader rollout, while also rolling back a recent change that coincided with the incident.
"It’s important to know that classroom teaching and student learning are continuing as normal," a Western Australia government spokesperson said.
"We urge Victorians to take extra caution against scammers by avoiding clicking on unexpected links they receive on their personal devices, or sharing personal details with callers claiming to be from banks or technology companies," a Victorian government spokesperson said.
"We’ve had some facilities return to using paper for scripts because authentication to get into lots of prescribing software requires multi-factor verification, which requires you to be able to access your Microsoft-supported email," AMA president Dr Michael Bonning said.
"We have no incoming or outgoing emails. Yes, it is affecting our admin and backend systems, but it is not affecting patient care," a RACGP spokesperson said.
"Some transactions in Service Centres and Call Centres are unavailable at this time. Customers are encouraged to delay their visit to a Service Centre and to complete transactions online, where possible," a Service NSW spokesperson told AAP.
Most affected services are those that rely on Microsoft Exchange for email, while Teams chats and online meetings remain largely functional, though scheduling may be impaired.