What went down and why

The Microsoft outage Australia-wide began well before breakfast, with Australians reporting problems with Microsoft 365 just before 5am AEST on Friday, according to Down Detector. Complaints climbed to a peak at 9.22am with more than 5,500 reports of problems, many of them trouble opening and sending emails, before the numbers dipped.

Schools, courts and government services were among those caught up in the global disruption. Microsoft said it had no indication of a cyber-attack and pointed to a possible configuration change on its servers, which could cause overload and servers going offline.

But by Friday afternoon the company's own update offered little comfort. In a message on its website, Microsoft said efforts to fix the issue were not "taking as expected", leaving the outage ongoing at the time of reporting.

Schools, courts and government services

Service NSW asked customers to delay visits to its service centres and set up a priority callback system for urgent transactions. The agency said some transactions in service centres and call centres were unavailable and advised people to complete transactions online where possible.

NSW schools felt it too: Schoolbytes, a cloud-based administration platform used by schools across the state, was temporarily unable to access emails. Parents received a text message telling them: "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 both reported the outage was affecting their email systems, though Victoria's county court said its scheduled hearings were expected to go ahead as planned.

Hospitals, retailers and security agencies

The Australian Medical Association said it had received reports of clerical issues at some hospitals and health clinics, but no impacts to patient care. AMA president Dr Michael Bonning said some facilities had gone back to paper because authentication systems were tied to Microsoft:

He added that none of these systems are used for direct patient care and that workarounds always exist. Elsewhere, Coles and Woolworths stores were operating as normal, although Coles said its internal email system had been affected, and the National Broadband Network said it was monitoring the outage but remained unaffected.

At a press conference alongside Australian federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett, home affairs minister Tony Burke heard from Asio director general Mike Burgess that the agency's systems operate on multiple levels and had been affected "on one level, yes, but not completely".

Scam warning and expert view

The National Cyber Security Coordinator warned that cybercriminals often seek to take advantage of the uncertainty around these types of disruptions through 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," the coordinator said, also advising people not to share personal information and to hang up and call back if unsure.

RMIT associate professor Mark Gregory said the outage appeared to sit in Microsoft's network layer, potentially similar to the configuration issue which brought down Optus's network in 2023. "If you lose part of that pool, then all of the users are trying to access the remaining servers, and that overloads them," he said, describing a cascading problem that takes time to diagnose. The underlying problem, in his view, was "a misconfiguration in the network layer".

While the workarounds held, staff were back to phones and paper, and Microsoft's fixes had yet to take hold by Friday afternoon.