Millions of people, including Australian workers and government agencies, were unable to access work emails, messages, and files on Friday morning as Microsoft experienced an hours-long global outage affecting Microsoft 365 business and enterprise accounts.
Australian Federal Police (AFP), the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) were among those affected by the incident, with local businesses and other organisations that use Microsoft 365 also impacted.
The major outage, purportedly caused by server issues, began at around 5am AEDT on Friday and was ongoing as of midday AEDT.
Minister for Cybersecurity, Tony Burke, told a press conference that he had been briefed by Microsoft that “they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber[attack] event”.
The company instead believed the outage is “an update that has gone awry”, suggested Burke, who compared the situation to when a software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a major Microsoft Windows outage in 2024.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Information Age that the technology giant has seen “no indication of a cyberattack”.
“We are aware and working to address issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” they said.
“We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.”
Dozens of Microsoft services crash during widespread outage
While most online service outages tend to impact one particular service or a small number of connected ones, Microsoft’s has been widespread across its platforms and has affected many regions around the globe.
Personal Microsoft accounts appeared unaffected, but many work accounts could not access the technology giant’s Outlook email platform, Teams messaging service, Copilot AI models, and other Microsoft 365 services such as OneDrive and Authenticator.
Microsoft initially confirmed users were potentially unable to access other services such as collaboration platforms SharePoint and Planner, Defender antivirus software, its task management app To Do, and endpoint management service Intune.
This soon expanded to include printing system Universal Print, data management platform PowerBI, data security and authentication system Microsoft Purview, and IT administrator platform Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center.
Prominent AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI also said they both experienced issues with Microsoft connectors, which their customers use to link their Microsoft services to the companies’ respective AI models Claude and ChatGPT.
Microsoft 365 services are used by millions of people globally, including many Australian businesses and government organisations. Image: Shutterstock
Microsoft investigates server and software issues
Several Microsoft servers became unresponsive and were removed from service soon after the outage began, and some experienced “elevated processor usage while handling requests”, the company said as it started to investigate the problem.
Technicians restarted some servers and made changes to components which are designed to check the health of Microsoft’s systems, the company added.
Shortly after 8am AEDT, Microsoft said it had “identified a small number of configuration updates” that it began investigating “as potential contributors to the issue”.
A short time later, the company said it was “assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery”.
By 9.10am AEDT, Microsoft said these actions had so far “not provided the anticipated relief”.
“Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss,” the company said.
It then isolated a portion of its infrastructure and continued restarting affected services.
It wasn’t until around 10am AEDT that Microsoft began returning some of the affected servers into service, which the firm said were “remaining stable”.
“We’ve also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions,” Microsoft said.
"… As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service."
Microsoft's outage reports on November 12 reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on Downdetector. Microsoft says its Exchange Online incident began at 16:17 UTC. Reports to Downdetector about Outlook began climbing at about 17:25 UTC, 12:25 in New York. By 18:25, reports about five Microsoft services combined reached 19,650 a minute, against <15 a minute on an average Thursday. Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level. Reports did not stay in the Americas. They jumped tenfold in the UK at 17:43, in India at 23:21 local time and in New Zealand at 06:55 local time. Between 17:00 and 18:55 UTC, nearly 3 in 10 reports came from outside the US. We count a country here once its reports reach ten times normal and at least 20 in five minutes. Reports about Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and OneDrive each rose more than a hundredfold, and Azure about a hundredfold. Xbox, GitHub and LinkedIn, also Microsoft's, rose far less. Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions. At 19:38 UTC, reports were still running at more than 11,000 a minute.
— Downdetector (@downdetector) November 12, 2026
Soon after 11am AEDT, Microsoft said that while the servers it returned to service “initially remain healthy”, some were again becoming unresponsive “once they began receiving traffic”.
The company said it was reverting some of the affected servers to “a previous software configuration” to see if this prevented them from becoming unresponsive, but the outage continued at the time of writing.
Microsoft’s investigations identified that “a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests”, the company said just after midday AEDT.
Microsoft added that it was also continuing work to revert “a recent network configuration change that correlates with the start of impact”, and was seeing "positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure".
The Australian Computer Society (ACS), which advocates for the nation's technology workforce, renewed its calls for a national review of sovereign IT risk in wake of the Microsoft outage.
ACS CEO Dr Prins Ralston said, "ASIO and the AFP had workarounds. Most small businesses and many agencies don't.
"Resilience shouldn't depend on whether you happen to have a second system.
"... We need to know the systems that keep this country running won't simply fall over without notice."
Several Microsoft services in Australia experienced outages for more than 24 hours between August and September of 2023, following power and staffing issues at a local data centre.
ACS is the publisher of Information Age.
