Microsoft outage disrupts Australian schools, courts and government services
A global Microsoft 365 disruption left Australian organisations relying on phone calls and paper systems, while the company said it had no indication of a cyberattack.
By Luana Sato ·
Australian schools, courts and government agencies faced disruption on Friday, 13 November, as a global Microsoft outage interrupted email and online meeting services. Some workplaces turned to telephone calls, text messages and paper processes while access to Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, was affected.
Reports from Australian users began shortly before 5am AEST, according to Down Detector. They appeared to reach a peak at 9.22am, with more than 5,500 reports, before declining. Users reported problems including opening and sending emails. A Microsoft spokesperson said there was no indication of a cyberattack and suggested a server configuration change could have overloaded some servers and taken them offline. By Friday afternoon, Microsoft said its attempts to resolve the problem were not working as expected.
Service NSW urged customers to postpone visits to its service centres and complete transactions online where possible, after some services became unavailable at its centres and through its call centres. It introduced priority callbacks for people unable to finish urgent transactions. At a press conference with home affairs minister Tony Burke, Australian federal police commissioner Krissy Barrett and Asio director general Mike Burgess confirmed their systems had been affected without providing further details. Burgess said the disruption affected one level of Asio’s systems, rather than the agency’s entire operation.
The Australian Medical Association received reports of administrative problems at some hospitals and health clinics, but said patient care had not been affected. Its president, Dr Michael Bonning, said some facilities had returned to paper prescriptions because access to prescribing software depended on multifactor authentication through Microsoft-supported email. He said alternative processes were available for these authorisation systems.
Schoolbytes, a cloud-based administration service used by NSW schools, temporarily lost access to email. A message to one parent asked anyone who had emailed the school after 3.15pm on Thursday, or needed to report absences or routine changes, to telephone the office. Courts in South Australia and Victoria also reported email disruption. Victoria’s county court said it expected scheduled hearings to proceed as planned.
The effects varied across workplaces. Some Reddit users said they could still use Teams despite losing Outlook email access, while a Brisbane-based LinkedIn user described switching to calls and SMS. Coles and Woolworths said their stores were operating normally, although Coles reported disruption to internal email. The National Broadband Network said it was monitoring developments and remained unaffected.
The National Cyber Security Coordinator warned that criminals could exploit uncertainty surrounding the outage through fraudulent emails, texts, calls and social media messages. Australians were urged to treat unsolicited contact cautiously, avoid unexpected links and attachments, and withhold personal information. The coordinator advised anyone uncertain about a call to hang up and call back.
Mark Gregory, an associate professor in RMIT University’s School of Engineering, said the problem appeared to involve Microsoft’s network layer and could resemble the configuration issue behind the 2023 Optus outage. He explained that losing some servers can force users onto a smaller remaining pool, overloading those servers and causing further failures. Such a chain of disruptions takes time to trace to its underlying cause, he said.
