Australia’s federal government activated a priority-restoration cyber agreement with Microsoft on Friday after a worldwide Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 failure cut off email and cloud services at the nation’s spy agency, federal police, state courts, and public schools.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke confirmed at a Friday news conference that Microsoft had briefed the government and does not believe a cyberattack caused the disruption, Reuters reported. Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Director-General Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett said at the same briefing that both agencies had systems knocked offline.
“There is good security work that is done with Microsoft as a business and when it came to the formal cyber agreements which I’ve signed on behalf of Australia, the first of those was with Microsoft,” Burke said.
“That agreement has in fact been activated today to make sure that we get appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests in this,” Burke added.
What Is Down Across Australia
For Australians trying to contact government offices, schools, or courts on Friday, email is the main point of failure. Burke noted that the disruption across federal departments is concentrated in email systems, forcing agencies and citizens to fall back on phone calls and text messages.
Beyond ASIO and the AFP, the outage disrupted the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, New South Wales Parliament email accounts, local councils, and government departments in the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. Courts in Victoria and South Australia also reported technical disruptions, according to The Guardian. Public schools in Western Australia and New South Wales (including campuses using the Schoolbytes administration platform) lost access to communication tools. State health administrative backends were affected as well, though direct patient care continued normally, and the National Broadband Network remained intact.
Because agencies and schools are shifting to phone callbacks and text messages while email is down, Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator warned residents that scammers could try to exploit the confusion.
“I encourage every Australian to remain vigilant and be cautious of unsolicited contact. Do not click on unexpected links, open attachments, or provide personal information. If you’re unsure, hang up and call back,” the coordinator said in a social media statement.
Why the Fix Is Taking Hours
The Australian disruptions arrived as the Friday workday began, hours after the global Microsoft 365 outage started on Thursday, November 12, taking down Outlook, Teams, and related cloud tools worldwide. Outage tracker Downdetector recorded Outlook fault reports peaking at more than 2,000 times their normal baseline, with total Microsoft error reports still topping 11,000 per minute at 19:38 UTC on Thursday.
“We are aware and working to address issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” Microsoft said in a statement reported by Information Age, the publication of the Australian Computer Society (ACS).
Microsoft later reported that its initial fixes were not taking effect as expected and that engineers were seeing only marginal progress patching servers while setting up alternate recovery workstreams. Mark Gregory, an associate professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, attributed the prolonged downtime to a network-layer configuration error that triggered a cascading server overload as displaced users flooded the remaining active servers — a pattern he compared to Australia’s November 2023 Optus network blackout.
Calls for Backup Systems and Cost Estimates
The breadth of Friday’s disruption prompted immediate warnings about how heavily Australian institutions rely on a single cloud vendor. Ashwin Pal, a risk advisory expert at RSM Australia, estimated that the 12-hour disruption would cost the Australian economy billions of dollars in direct and indirect losses. ACS Chief Executive Officer Dr. Prins Ralston urged the federal government to audit critical IT infrastructure that depends on a single provider.
“ASIO and the AFP had workarounds. Most small businesses and many agencies don’t. Resilience shouldn’t depend on whether you happen to have a second system,” Ralston said. Microsoft said its recovery process remains underway across alternate workstreams, without giving an estimated time for full restoration.