Microsoft Outage Positive Results Fade as Fix Stalls in Australia
A global Microsoft 365 outage knocked out Outlook and Teams for Australian schools, courts and government agencies on Friday, November 13, 2026. Early signs of recovery faded when Microsoft said its fix was not working as expected.
A global Microsoft 365 outage left Australian schools, courts and government services without email on Friday, November 13, 2026, and early microsoft outage positive results gave way to a warning from the company that its fix was not working as expected.
Australians began reporting problems with Microsoft 365, which includes Outlook and Teams, just before 5am AEST, according to outage tracker Down Detector. Reports peaked at 9.22am with more than 5,500 complaints, mostly about opening and sending email, before they began to dip.
What Microsoft said
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company had no indication of a cyber-attack. The spokesperson suggested the fault could stem from a configuration change to its servers, which left some of them overloaded and taken offline.
Reports of positive results for server stability followed during the day. Then, in an update to its website on Friday afternoon, Microsoft said efforts to fix the issue were not "taking as expected".
Government and courts hit
Service NSW, the state agency that handles driver, resident and business services, urged customers to delay visits to its service centres. It set up a priority callback system for people who could not finish urgent transactions. "Some transactions in Service Centres and Call Centres are unavailable at this time," the agency said.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke held a press conference with Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett and Mike Burgess, director general of the spy agency Asio. Both agencies said the outage had affected their systems, without giving details. Burgess said Asio's systems operate on multiple levels and were hit "on one level, yes, but not completely".
Courts in South Australia and Victoria said the outage disrupted their email systems. Victoria's county court said its scheduled hearings were expected to go ahead as planned.
Schools, hospitals and business
Schoolbytes, a cloud-based administration platform used by NSW schools, was temporarily unable to access email. One school told parents to phone the office about absences or routine changes if they had emailed after 3.15pm the day before.
The Australian Medical Association said some hospitals and clinics had clerical problems but patient care was not affected. President Dr Michael Bonning said some facilities went back to paper prescriptions. Prescribing software often requires multifactor verification, which depends on access to Microsoft-supported email.
Some services kept running. 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 not affected.
On social media, workers described a day of phone calls and text messages. One Brisbane user wrote on LinkedIn that staff would "have to talk to people while Microsoft sort out their email issues". Some Reddit users said Outlook was down while Teams still worked.
