Microsoft narrows down cause
In the latest update on the Microsoft 365 outage, the company said it has found that the process on servers affected that is responsible for establishing a secure connection becomes overwhelmed, causing those servers to stop processing requests.
The company said it is preparing a configuration change to address this, and will test it out on a subset of servers before applying more broadly, along with restarting those servers.
A recent configuration change is also being rolled back. It was this change that correlated with the start of the outage, and Microsoft is watching to see if this contributes to the recovery effort.
Service NSW asks customers not to visit its centres
Service NSW, the one-stop-shop agency for residents, drivers and business owners to access government services in NSW, has encouraged customers to delay their visits to its service centres.
A spokesperson told AAP:
Some transactions in Service Centres and Call Centres are unavailable at this time.
Customers are encouraged to delay their visit to a Service Centre and to complete transactions online, where possible.
The agency said a priority call-back system is in place for those unable to complete urgent transactions during the outage.
Employees in the Northern Territory government also said their services were down in their department, AAP has confirmed.
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'Looks like we will have to talk to people’: Australians on their email-free day
On social media, people are sharing how the outage has impacted their work day.
On Reddit, some users are reporting that while Outlook emails are down they can still access Microsoft’s workplace messaging platform, Teams.
“They could have taken Teams out with them so I’d be able to ... just sit here and do absolutely nothing,” one Reddit user wrote.
On LinkedIn, many are posting about what an email-free day looks like.
“It’s all SMS and phone calls today… looks like we will have to talk to people while Microsoft sort out their email issues!” wrote Brisbane-based Tom Freer.
Government agencies contacted by Guardian Australia for comment said they themselves were having trouble responding to media queries as their own email inboxes were down. One agency said they’d been relayed an email via text.
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Microsoft emails most affected in outage
The latest update from Microsoft reveals most of the services experiencing the outage now are those that connect to Microsoft Exchange - the service used for emails.
Currently users still may not be able to access their inbox using Outlook.
Notably, Microsoft now says Team chats and online meetings “remain largely functional” but meeting scheduling, and creating chats might be an issue due to the Exchange issue.
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.
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Tasmanian and WA state government emails hit by outage
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:
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:
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.
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Digital NSW has said an investigation into the impact of the outage on NSW government systems is under way.
A spokesperson said:
We are working to restore services as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience.
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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.
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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:
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:
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.
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Microsoft having issues bringing servers back online
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:
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.
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Microsoft ‘do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event’, Tony Burke says
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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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”.
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Welcome
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:
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