Global Microsoft 365 outage disrupts email services, officials say no cyber attack

A global outage of Microsoft 365 services began early Friday morning, causing widespread disruption to email, calendar and collaboration tools such as Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. Microsoft said the problem appears to stem from a recent software update and that there is no indication of a cyber-attack.

Australian authorities reported varying impacts. The Western Australian government said it was receiving updates from the Commonwealth and that Microsoft was prioritising life, safety and government services. The Tasmanian government noted that critical frontline systems remained unaffected, while some schools were informing parents of email outages. New South Wales’ Digital Services agency confirmed an investigation into the impact on state systems.

Federal police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation also experienced disruptions, according to Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, who said Microsoft’s Australian head described the issue as similar to a mis-configured update rather than a malicious event.

Industry experts compared the outage to the 2023 Optus network failure, citing a misconfiguration in Microsoft’s network layer that forced users onto a reduced pool of servers, leading to overload and cascading failures. RMIT University associate professor Mark Gregory advised organisations to improve testing of configuration changes and maintain backup communication channels.

Major Australian retailers Coles and Woolworths reported normal store operations, though Coles’ internal email was affected. Courts in South Australia and Victoria, as well as some public-service staff and cloud-based school administration platforms, experienced email outages.

Down Detector logged nearly 130,000 reports of issues worldwide, with the peak of complaints occurring around 9:22 a.m. Affected users described being unable to send, receive or open messages. Microsoft said it was analysing diagnostic data, limiting traffic to affected servers and rolling back to earlier software configurations to restore service.