Business · NY Daily Wire
Key events 23m ago Microsoft: seeing 'marginal success' patching servers 48m ago Tech giants and international airlines say they’ve been hit by outage 1h ago Microsoft’s global outage will cost Australia billions, expert says 4h ago Microsoft outage may persist as fix is 'not taking as expected' 5h ago Victorian government warns of opportunistic scammers amid outage 6h ago 'Looks like we will have to talk to people’: Australians on their email-free day 7h ago WA government: 'Microsoft are prioritising life, safety and Government services' 7h ago What we know so far about the global Microsoft outage 7h ago Microsoft having issues bringing servers back online 7h ago Microsoft ‘do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event’, Tony Burke says 7h ago Schools, courts and public service staff affected 7h ago Thousands of Australians report issues with Microsoft 365 7h ago Welcome There are plenty of essential services that remain unaffected by the outage, which is largely impacting email systems. The Australian Medical Association said it has so far not received any reports that hospitals or clinics are impacted. The two major supermarkets – Coles and Woolworths – are operating as normal inside their stories.
However Coles’s internal email system has been impacted. The National Broadband Network has acknowledged it is monitoring the outage but says it also remains unaffected. WA government: 'Microsoft are prioritising life, safety and Government services' Adeshola Ore State government email services have been affected by the Microsoft outage.
A Tasmanian government spokesperson said there was no impact to critical systems used for frontline services. The spokesperson said: double quotation mark Impact is largely restricted to the sending and receiving of email. Guardian Australia understands some Tasmanian schools are reaching out to parents to inform them that email services are down.
In a statement, a Western Australian state government spokesperson said: double quotation mark Western Australia, along with jurisdictions around the world, is being impacted by a global Microsoft outage. We are receiving updates from the Commonwealth who are working with Microsoft at the most senior levels to resolve. Microsoft are prioritising life, safety and Government services.
Digital NSW has said an investigation into the impact of the outage on NSW government systems is under way. A spokesperson said: double quotation mark We are working to restore services as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience. What we know so far about the global Microsoft outage The impact is largely on email systems and appears to be sparked by an update issue.
Microsoft has said there is no indication of a cyber attack. The company has indicated it could take some time to fix, as the company has noticed that the servers it is returning to service became unresponsive again once traffic starts returning to them. Outage website Down Detector showed nearly 130,000 reports of issues worldwide affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive.
An expert has said the issue appears similar to the configuration issue which brought down Optus’s network in 2023 with the outage appearing to affect the network layer in Microsoft’s systems. Some government services, including schools using cloud-based administration services, have been impacted. Some businesses, and Australia’s federal police and security services were also affected.
An error message is shown when trying to access Microsoft’s Outlook. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images Problem appears similar to the one that hit Optus in 2023, expert says An expert has said the issue appears similar to the configuration issue which brought down Optus’s network in 2023 with the outage appearing to affect the network layer in Microsoft’s systems. Mark Gregory, an associate professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, 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.
He said: double quotation mark 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. Gregory said it showed companies should invest more in testing environments for configuration changes before deployment in the live network, and said businesses reliant on cloud services such as Microsoft 365 should have backup options. He said: double quotation mark From a global perspective, there is someone somewhere that’s that’s been badly affected by this and you end up with lost productivity.
They’re being left high and dry now ... it then becomes important to have an alternative. Many people would keep a Gmail account. If their Microsoft goes down, they use Gmail.
If Gmail goes down, they use Microsoft. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images Microsoft having issues bringing servers back online Josh Taylor In the latest update from Microsoft on the global 365 outage, the company has indicated it could take some time to fix, as the company has noticed that the servers returning to service became unresponsive again once traffic starts returning to them. The company said: double quotation mark We’re analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what’s triggering this behavior.
Microsoft is limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected servers in specific locations in an effort to determine which type of request is bringing down the servers, and to allow the company to bring the servers back online. It’s also rolling back to an earlier software configuration on some of these servers to see if that prevents the issue and will expand that to other servers if it is successful. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters Microsoft ‘do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event’, Tony Burke says Josh Butler Australia’s federal police and security services were affected by the Microsoft outage, the heads of those agencies have confirmed.
The federal home affairs minister, Tony Burke , said Microsoft’s Australian head told him they believed the outage was sparked by an update issue. He told a press conference: double quotation mark The perspective of Microsoft at this stage, they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event. They believe that they’re dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has that has gone awry.
Burke said Microsoft had reported the impact was largely on email systems. However he noted that the CrowdStrike incident had led to large “downstream impacts” on a range of separate products. Home affairs minister Tony Burke.
Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/AAP Burke appeared alongside the Australian federal police commissioner, Krissy Barrett , and the Asio director general Mike Burgess , who both said their systems had been affected by the outage, but provided no further details. Burgess said Asio’s systems “operate on multiple levels”, adding that they had been affected “on one level, yes, but not completely.” Asio and the AFP were contacted for comment. Schools, courts and public service staff affected Sources in the Australian public service said some of their services had been affected on Friday morning.
Guardian Australia has contacted federal and state governments to find out how much its services have been affected. School Bytes, a cloud-based administration platform used by schools in New South Wales, 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 have reported that the outage affected its email systems.
Thousands of Australians report issues with Microsoft 365 Australians began reporting issues with Microsoft 365 just before 5am AEST, according to Down Detector. The problem appeared to peak at 9.22am with more 5,500 reports of problems including trouble opening and sending emails before beginning to dip. “I can receive messages, but can’t open them!,” one person reported on Down Detector three hours ago.
Another reported just before 10am: “Been down for hours”. A global outage has affected Microsoft 365 products including Outlook. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images Welcome Jordyn Beazley Hello, I’m Jordyn Beazley and I’ll be bringing you the latest updates on the global outage of Microsoft 365.
Microsoft says some servers are returning to service and a streamlined recovery process is under way to end a global outage that has resulted in nearly 130,000 users worldwide reporting issues accessing its 365 suite of software, including Outlook and Teams. Outage website Down Detector showed a spike in Microsoft 365 problems, with nearly 130,000 reports of issues affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. AI assistant Copilot was also affected.
New reports have since fallen from that peak but many said they couldn’t send and receive emails, or had trouble loading their inboxes altogether. My colleague Josh Taylor has everything you need to know so far here:
Source: The Guardian
