A global Microsoft 365 outage has cut off work email for many Australian businesses, schools, hospitals and government agencies on Friday morning. Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot are among the services Microsoft says may be affected, and in its latest update before 9:40am AEDT the company said its fixes had not yet brought the relief it expected. Microsoft has not said when service will be fully restored.
Here’s what Microsoft has confirmed, what it hasn’t, how the outage is playing out in Australia, and what you can sensibly do while you wait. This story reflects information available at 9:40am AEDT on Friday 13 November.
What happened, and when
Microsoft’s official Microsoft 365 Status account first acknowledged problems with Exchange Online mailboxes, the cloud email service behind business Outlook accounts, at 4:54am AEDT, describing it as affecting users “in the Americas”. Thirteen minutes later it said the issue “may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region”. Microsoft is tracking the problem as incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821; according to ChannelNews, Microsoft gives the start of the broader MO1550821 incident as 1:26pm US Eastern time, which is 5:26am AEDT.
It is a separate event from a Microsoft Teams problem in North America that the company said it had fully resolved at 4:09am AEDT, shortly before the email problems began.
On Microsoft’s service health page, the list of services that are “potentially impacted” has grown through the morning. As reported by the ABC’s live coverage at 9:20am AEDT, it includes:
- Exchange Online (business Outlook email and calendars)
- Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Planner and To Do
- Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Microsoft Defender XDR, Defender for Office 365, Intune and several Purview compliance services
- Some Power BI exports and parts of the Microsoft 365 Apps admin centre
The outage is mainly hitting paying business and enterprise customers. ChannelNews reports that consumer Outlook.com accounts “appear” to have been largely unaffected, though Microsoft hasn’t said that itself. Readers’ reports to the ABC also show the impact is patchy: some people have lost email but still have Teams chat or OneDrive, while others have lost several services at once.
What Microsoft says is causing it
Microsoft has not blamed a cyberattack, and it has not named a root cause. What it has said, in order:
- At 6:31am AEDT, that the strain was “not driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure” (Microsoft 365 Status).
- At 6:50am, that servers were failing automated health checks and dropping out of service, and that it had begun restarting all affected servers (Microsoft 365 Status). It had already paused all deployments, it said earlier.
- At 8:00am, that an alternative health-check method had returned “a subset” of servers to service and was being applied more broadly (Microsoft 365 Status). Its review had identified “a small number of configuration updates” it was investigating as possible contributors.
- At 8:40am, that it was assessing whether reverting those configuration updates could speed up recovery (Microsoft 365 Status).
- At 9:09am, that “our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief”. It said a core process on the affected servers was becoming overwhelmed, and that it was isolating part of its infrastructure to test a recovery approach before applying it more widely, while also considering isolating traffic by region so regions could recover independently (Microsoft 365 Status; fuller wording via the ABC).
Some commentators have floated other explanations. Technology journalist Leigh Stark told ABC NewsRadio he suspected a denial-of-service attack, while RMIT associate professor Mark Gregory told the ABC and The Guardian he suspected a network misconfiguration, comparing it with the problem behind Optus’s 2023 outage. Both are opinions. Microsoft’s own updates point to failing health checks and recent configuration changes, not an attack, and nothing published so far confirms either theory.
How big is it, and how it is hitting Australia
Outage tracker Downdetector logged about 130,000 Outlook problem reports at the peak, around 5am AEDT, according to CNBC, The Guardian and the BBC. Downdetector said nearly seven in 10 reports came from the US, according to the ABC. In Australia, Downdetector had recorded more than 4,400 Outlook reports by 8:20am, the ABC reported. Downdetector counts are user reports, not a measure of how many accounts are affected.
The outage started before most Australians woke up, but it has hit as the working day starts. A spokesperson for the Home Affairs Minister told the ABC that the National Cyber Security Coordinator, Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, is aware of the outage and looking into it. Readers have told the ABC about problems at hospitals, medical practices, schools, family violence services and supermarket supply chains, and one rail worker said train paperwork normally sent by email couldn’t be uploaded.
One knock-on effect stands out: people who receive sign-in codes by email have been locked out of other apps too. The outage is also reaching services built on top of Microsoft 365. OpenAI and Anthropic both said their Microsoft 365 connectors were affected, the ABC reported. The My Telstra app was also unavailable this morning, but the ABC said it had asked Telstra whether that was related, and no link has been confirmed.
What you can do right now
Most of this is out of your hands, because the fault is on Microsoft’s side. But a few things help:
- Check the right place. Microsoft points people to its public status page if the Microsoft 365 admin centre won’t load, and IT admins can follow incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the admin centre. Microsoft also posts updates on its Microsoft 365 Status account on X.
- Don’t reset your password or rebuild your Outlook profile. ChannelNews notes that this won’t help while the fault is on Microsoft’s side, and it can create work for your IT team later.
- Use another channel for anything urgent. Pick up the phone, or use a personal email address or messaging app if your workplace allows it. Avoid sending sensitive client or patient information through personal accounts.
- Don’t rely on email codes for a while. If a service sends sign-in codes to a work email address you can’t reach, check whether it offers another method, such as an authenticator app or SMS, once you are able to sign in.
- Be wary of “fix” messages. Our advice, based on what happens around most big outages: treat unexpected emails, texts or calls claiming to restore your Microsoft account with suspicion, and don’t install tools or enter passwords from links. Get updates from Microsoft or your own IT team. Outlook users who haven’t yet installed this week’s security updates should also check those patches once services are back.
Our read
This is our analysis, not Microsoft’s. Microsoft’s updates suggest an internal failure, not an outside attack, and the fact that it is considering rolling back recent configuration changes points the same way. But its 9:09am admission that its fixes had not worked as hoped means Australian organisations should plan for disruption to continue for at least part of Friday.
The bigger lesson is the one the ABC’s experts made: when email, chat, files, security tools and AI assistants all depend on one cloud provider, one failure can stop an entire workplace. ChannelNews counts this as the second major Microsoft 365 outage of 2026, after one on 22 January. As with the Optus outage that disrupted Triple Zero calls in September, the practical answer for businesses is an offline contact list, sign-in methods that don’t depend on the service that has failed, and a plan for working without email for a morning.
We’ll be looking for two things once service returns: whether Microsoft publishes a clear root cause, and whether Australian customers get any explanation or service credits. Until then, treat restoration estimates with caution.
Featured image: a Microsoft Surface Pro showing Microsoft 365 app icons (stock photo, not taken during the outage). Photo: KK IN HK via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; resized and converted to PNG. Microsoft trademarks shown for editorial purposes; no endorsement implied.
