‘Looks like we’ll have to talk to people’: Australia sent back to time before email with major Microsoft outage

Australian schools, courts and government services have been hurled back in time to how business used to be done after a global Microsoft outage caused emails and online meetings to go dark.

Australians began reporting issues with Microsoft 365 – which includes Outlook and Teams – just before 5am AEST on Friday, according to Down Detector. The problem appeared to peak at 9.22am with more than 5,500 reports of problems, including trouble opening and sending emails, before reports began to dip.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company “had no indication of a cyber-attack” and suggested the issue could be related to a configuration change to its servers that was causing some to become overloaded and taken offline.

In an update to its website on Friday afternoon, the company said efforts to fix the issue were not “taking as expected”.

Government services affected

Service NSW, the one-stop shop agency for residents, drivers, and business owners to access government services, encouraged customers to delay their visits to its service centres. The agency put in place a priority callback system for those unable to complete urgent transactions during the outage.

“Some transactions in Service Centres and Call Centres are unavailable at this time,” it said. “Customers are encouraged to delay their visit to a Service Centre and to complete transactions online, where possible.”

Earlier in the morning, the federal home affairs minister, Tony Burke, appeared at a press conference with the Australian federal police commissioner, Krissy Barrett, and the Asio director general, Mike Burgess. Both said their systems had been affected by the outage, but they provided no further details.

Burgess said the spy agency’s systems “operate on multiple levels”, adding that they had been affected “on one level, yes, but not completely”.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) said it had received reports that some hospitals and health clinics were experiencing clerical issues, but there had been no impacts to patient care.

“We’ve had some facilities return to using paper for scripts because authentication to get into lots of prescribing software requires multifactor verification, which requires you to be able to access your Microsoft-supported email,” the AMA president, Dr Michael Bonning, said.

“We don’t use any of these things for direct patient care. It’s always the authorisation in systems, so we’ve always got workarounds for that.”

Schoolbytes, a cloud-based administration platform used by schools in NSW, was “temporarily” unable to access emails due to the outage.

A text sent to a parent regarding the platforms outage said: “If you emailed the school after 3.15pm yesterday, or need to communicate with us regarding absences or changes to routines please call the office …”

Courts in South Australia and Victoria reported that the outage was affecting its email system. Victoria’s county court said its scheduled hearings were expected to go ahead as planned.

On social media, people shared how the outage was affecting their workday.

One Brisbane-based person posted on LinkedIn: “It’s all SMS and phone calls today … looks like we will have to talk to people while Microsoft sort out their email issues!”

On Reddit, some users reported that while Outlook emails were down they could still access Microsoft’s workplace messaging platform, Teams.

“They could have taken Teams out with them so I’d be able to … just sit here and do absolutely nothing,” one Reddit user wrote.

Scam warning amid outage

Some services remained unaffected by the outage. The two major supermarkets – Coles and Woolworths – were operating as normal inside their stores. However, Coles said its internal email system has been affected.

The National Broadband Network said it was monitoring the outage, but remained unaffected.

The National Cyber Security Coordinator warned cybercriminals often seek to take advantage of the “uncertainty around these types of disruptions” with scam emails, texts, calls or social media messages.

“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 wrote on social media.

Mark Gregory, an associate professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, said the outage appeared to be affecting the network layer in Microsoft’s systems, and was potentially similar to the configuration issue which brought down Optus’s network in 2023.

He said when some of the servers have configuration issues, it means customers are forced to share a smaller pool of servers to access the cloud services.

“If you lose part of that pool, then all of the users are trying to access the remaining servers, and that overloads them. And then they go down.

“And so you end up with a cascading problem. Then it takes time to find the underlying problem: in this case, a misconfiguration in the network layer.”