Microsoft Outage Affecting Australians Hits Schools, Courts, Clinics
A global Microsoft 365 failure took down Outlook and parts of Teams for Australians from before 5am AEST on Friday. Courts, schools, Service NSW and clinics were affected, and by the afternoon Microsoft said its latest fix was not taking as expected.
A Microsoft outage affecting Australians knocked out Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services from just before 5am AEST on Friday, November 13, 2026, and was still unresolved by the afternoon. Microsoft said its latest changes to fix the problem were "not taking as expected".
Reports to the monitoring site Down Detector peaked at 9.22am AEST, with more than 5,500 Australian reports of problems such as trouble opening and sending email. Reports then began to dip.
What Microsoft has said
Microsoft said users may be unable to connect to Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365, Defender, Planner, To Do, Intune, Purview and Power BI. It posted an update just after 9am AEST saying a "gradual recovery" had begun.
An hour later, restored servers were becoming unresponsive again. Microsoft said a process on those servers "responsible for establishing secure connections" was overwhelmed and had stopped processing requests.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company had no indication of a cyber-attack. The spokesperson suggested a configuration change to its servers could be overloading some of them and taking them offline.
The disruption began shortly before 1pm US Eastern time on Thursday and ran through the Asian business day into the European morning. Microsoft said it was extending the window in which delayed emails keep trying to deliver, for up to 48 hours, to protect messages. Its shares were 2.6% lower in premarket trading.
Government and schools affected
Service NSW told customers to delay visits to service centres and set up a priority callback system for urgent transactions. Courts in South Australia and Victoria said their email systems were affected, though Victoria's County Court expected scheduled hearings to go ahead.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was dealing with something similar to CrowdStrike, where an update had gone awry. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett and Asio Director-General Mike Burgess both said their systems had been affected. Burgess said the effect was "on one level, yes, but not completely".
Australian Medical Association president Dr Michael Bonning said some facilities had gone back to paper scripts. He said the problem was that signing in to prescribing software requires multifactor verification through Microsoft-linked email, and that direct patient care did not depend on those systems.
Coles and Woolworths stores operated as normal, though Coles said its internal email was affected. The National Broadband Network said it was monitoring the outage but was unaffected.
Workers and students
Peter Roche in Adelaide said he could not process invoices or reach accounting software with Microsoft Authenticator down. "[It's] very difficult to do work, losing thousands of dollars because we aren't getting the orders in and the invoices out," he said.
Emilie Yu in Melbourne said she could not reach help from her teachers while preparing for two remaining VCE language exams. Manny Flores, also in Melbourne, said a job interview held over Teams had been rescheduled to next week.
Niusha Shafiabady, head of IT discipline at Australian Catholic University, said the outage showed how reliant Australia is on technology it does not control. "When systems fail overseas, Australian businesses can feel the consequences almost immediately," she said.
By Friday afternoon, Microsoft had not found a long-term fix.
