Microsoft Outage Shows Australia Leans on US Cloud, Experts Say
A global Microsoft outage hit Outlook, SharePoint and Copilot, and Australian university experts say it exposes the country's reliance on US tech giants. They call for contingency plans and tighter rules, and warn that building local alternatives would need significant investment.
A global Microsoft outage that disrupted Outlook, SharePoint and Copilot shows Australia is heavily dependent on US technology companies, university experts said. They warn that reducing that dependence will require significant investment.
The disruption hit Microsoft platforms worldwide. Microsoft posted an update just after 9am AEST saying it had begun a "gradual recovery" of access to email and other online services.
An hour later, a second update said restored servers were becoming unresponsive again. Microsoft kept reporting the ups and downs of its recovery as the day went on.
A concentrated market
Andrew Cullen, a University of Melbourne academic who specializes in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, said US technology runs through Australia's digital infrastructure. He pointed to email and websites as examples.
"We're so dependent upon these tech companies," Cullen said. "Most of our emails come through either Microsoft or Google. Most of our websites are managed under the hood by Amazon or a few other kind of key cloud providers."
Cloud providers are companies that run software and data on remote servers that customers rent instead of owning. Cullen said that makes it "really challenging" for Australians to control their own digital destiny.
Plans for businesses, rules for government
Cullen said organizations cannot always predict where an outage will start, but they can prepare. For businesses, he said, that means working out how to run operations without email or Teams.
He also wants government to act. These services, he said, "can't be treated as being too big to fail". He called for a push to make them as robust as the banking system "through legislation, through oversight and regulatory controls".
Toby Murray, a University of Melbourne cybersecurity specialist who previously worked for the Department of Defence, said advice on resilience is changing. For the past 10 to 15 years, he said, organizations have typically moved to cloud-based services.
"It is a real challenge once you move these systems into the cloud and when we all rely on a very small number of vendors for those cloud services," Murray said.
The cost of alternatives
Murray said governments or businesses could build alternatives to Microsoft and similar providers. Running those services in-house would be more expensive and demand significant investment, he said.
"You're then responsible for maintaining them yourself, which brings its own risks and its own costs as well," he said. For many organizations, he added, the cloud is cheaper and often more secure than each small business running its own email system.
More outages expected
Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the University of New South Wales AI Institute, said he expects more outages and hacks in the years ahead. He pointed to vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used by more than two-thirds of websites, which led to millions of hacking attempts.
"I hate to be a doom monger, but we're discovering that the foundations of the internet are somewhat shaky," Walsh said. He said he was told the PHP bug was found by typing "find a serious flaw in PHP" into an AI prompt and letting the system run.
"So those tools now are available pretty much to anyone," Walsh said.
