Microsoft outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot as schools, universities and government agencies scramble for a fix

Shortly before 5am AEDT on Friday, reports of Outlook failures began to climb on the outage tracker Downdetector's Australian page. Within an hour the problem had reached 74 countries. By about 9.30am, more than 5500 people in Australia had reported trouble accessing Microsoft services, part of a worldwide tally of more than 130,000 users. At the worst point, reports were arriving at close to 20,000 a minute.

Microsoft's attempts to repair the fault have not gone to plan. In its most recent update, the company said it had monitored the changes it applied and confirmed they were not taking as expected. It said it was identifying alternate workstreams to add capacity in the face of what it called sustained traffic management imbalances. Servers it had begun to restore were collapsing again once web traffic returned to them.

The company has described several steps. It found a core process on affected servers becoming overwhelmed, causing a loss of capacity. It is limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations, to see whether one kind of request is contributing, and so restore service in stages. It is also rebuilding a subset of servers on a previous software configuration, and will extend that to more servers if the results are positive. Earlier, Microsoft said a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, and later said a health check appeared to have caused some to shut themselves down. It has paused all deployments and configuration changes while it reviews recent changes. The cause remains under investigation.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft does not believe it is dealing with a cyber event. He said the company sees it as similar in some ways to CrowdStrike, where an update went awry, and that the impact so far was very much on email systems. The 2024 CrowdStrike failure hit more than 8.5 million Windows devices after a faulty channel file update crashed them.

The list of affected services is long: Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Defender XDR, Planner, To Do, Intune and Defender for Office 365. Several Purview services are also impaired, including Data Loss Prevention and Data Classification. Power BI exports of reports with sensitivity labels may intermittently fail, and parts of the 365 Apps Admin Centre are affected. Universal Print may return errors, and some Windows 365 Cloud PC users may be unable to connect.

In Australia, schools have told parents and carers they cannot send or receive email. An Adelaide University employee said all staff and students were affected after the university's servers went down. Charles Sturt University confirmed Outlook and other Microsoft services were hit, though Teams and Zoom were working. One employee said the loss of email stops many staff and student requests from being actioned, and that systems requiring email authentication cannot complete it. Workarounds exist for many tasks, but core work is still being held up. Government departments and health departments are understood to be affected too, and outages vary between institutions.

Emergency services appear intact. Triple Zero in Victoria said callers can still reach it and that there will be no direct impact on its services. Queensland Health said people should keep using Triple Zero, reported no known clinical impacts, and said business continuity plans are being enacted where needed. Health district landlines and mobiles are understood to be working. Melbourne Airport flights are unaffected, though Virgin said confirmation emails could be delayed. Services NSW said some transactions at service centres and call centres are unavailable, urged customers to delay visits or transact online, and said a priority callback system exists for urgent cases.

Martin Latimer of the Customer Owned Banking Association warned that scammers exploit moments like this. He said they use phone calls and robocalls to create urgency, and advised hanging up and calling back on a known number if a caller claims to be from an internet provider or company IT. He said banks never ask customers to send funds, disclose passwords or grant device access, and that once service returns, scammers are likely to pose as technical support. Anyone who suspects a scam should contact their bank immediately. Microsoft has not given a time for full recovery.