Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, faced a global outage early Friday, leaving users worldwide frustrated. By 8:22am AEDT, over 120,000 people had reported issues with Outlook alone, with more than 2,500 reports coming from Australia. The outage disrupted services for governments, health systems, and businesses across Australia, including Service NSW, NSW Parliament, and Queensland Health.
Microsoft initially attributed the outage to unexpected server failures that overloaded remaining systems. Early attempts to restart servers and redirect traffic failed, and the company later discovered that software on the broken servers was causing them to freeze under load. Some regions saw partial recovery, but servers kept crashing as soon as they were brought back online. Microsoft is now limiting traffic while investigating the root cause.
As of 2:13pm AEDT, Microsoft admitted that its fixes were "not taking as expected" and was exploring alternative solutions. The company has ruled out a cyber attack but has not provided a timeline for full recovery. This outage follows previous disruptions to Microsoft 365 in January and August of this year, raising concerns about the reliability of its cloud services.
Microsoft continues to monitor the situation, testing configuration changes and restarting affected servers. The company has not yet identified the exact cause of the outage but is working to restore services gradually. The National Cyber Security Coordinator is also investigating the incident.