Experts say outage exposed Australia’s reliance on foreign technology
Microsoft has apologised for a widespread global outage that began Friday morning and ran roughly 18 hours before services started to recover. The company said it had “addressed the underlying issue” and was bringing services back gradually to ensure a stable restoration. Microsoft said the outage was a “technical issue” not related to cyber-attacks or AI agents, and suggested it may have been caused by problems with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 up and running.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice-president of Copilot, said: “We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue.”
In Australia, the disruption hit businesses, hospitals, courts, schools and government agencies, and experts warned the outage could be a disaster for the Australian economy that forces some small businesses to close, with costs expected to run into the billions of dollars. Ashwin Pal of RSM Australia said his clients had activated business continuity and disaster recovery plans, but that many businesses did not have a fallback. “A protracted event like this can easily be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for smaller entities,” Pal said. Pal said Microsoft had obviously struggled to recover, which raised bigger questions. “I’m a technologist and I’m actually flabbergasted as to how something like this could have happened … they pushed out a change which should have been tested,” Pal said.
The Australian Computer Society renewed calls for the federal government to urgently review which critical IT systems rely on a single provider, and where backup options could keep the economy running. Ralston said the outage had “exposed Australia’s reliance on foreign technology,” particularly for small businesses. “Australians who couldn’t get paid, couldn’t send an invoice, or couldn’t reach a government service this morning are entitled to be worried,” Ralston said.
Australian hospitals and health clinics were affected, although the Australian Medical Association said on Friday there had been no impacts for patient care. “We’ve had some facilities return to using paper for scripts because authentication to get into lots of prescribing software requires multifactor verification, which requires you to be able to access your Microsoft-supported email,” said the AMA’s president, Dr Michael Bonning.
Courts in South Australia and Victoria reported that the outage had affected their email systems, and many schools across the country were also affected. Service NSW, the agency residents, drivers and business owners use to access government services, encouraged customers to delay visits to its service centres. Federal government departments were also affected, including national security agencies. Mike Burgess, the head of the domestic spy agency ASIO, said on Friday that the organisation’s systems “operate on multiple levels” and had been affected “on one level, yes, but not completely.”
The outage affected businesses and organisations around the world that use Microsoft products. In the UK, healthcare systems were disrupted and several British police forces urged people not to try to report crimes online and to phone them instead. US government offices across the country were affected, including congressional offices that rely heavily on Outlook email; the US House’s chief administrative officer, who handles IT for the chamber, sent a “campus-wide alert” to staffers on Thursday about the outage, Politico reported. In Japan, the shipping company Sagawa Express said it was unable to accept online reservations for some services at airports and train stations, while the pharmaceutical company Taisho said it was having to handle orders by phone.
When stock market trading opened on Wall Street, shares in Microsoft dipped slightly, down 1.1% at $516.86.