Microsoft apologises for global outage, deep impact on Australia

Microsoft on Friday apologised for a major global service outage that disrupted millions of customers and partners, saying services were gradually recovering and stability was being restored across affected regions. In a post on X, the technology giant said it was “deeply sorry” for the disruption and acknowledged the trust customers placed in its services. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services,” the company said. 
Microsoft clarified that the disruption was caused by a technical issue and was not related to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence (AI) agents. According to the company, the incident originated from a problem during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced following a subsequent network change. Microsoft said it had addressed the underlying issue and was working to restore services for customers and regions that remained affected.
The company said services were restored in phases, with stability checks conducted at each stage, given the scale of demand. Although the gradual approach extended recovery time, it helped ensure a stable restoration, it added. Microsoft also said it would release a detailed post-incident report after completing its review. The disruption knocked out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, affecting users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa, according to the outage tracker Downdetector.
Earlier, the company had reported progress in recovery, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across an increasing portion of the affected infrastructure. The outage, which began on Thursday night, was linked to server health-check failures that rendered affected servers unavailable. Microsoft initially attempted to resolve the issue by testing configuration changes and restarting affected servers. It also introduced an alternative health-check method, enabling some affected servers to resume operations.The prolonged disruption affected businesses, airlines and government operations across several countries on Friday, interrupting access to widely used Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot.
The Microsoft outage could be a disaster for the Australian economy that forces some small businesses to close, with costs expected to run into the billions of dollars, experts have warned. Experts have said the outage exposes “Australia’s reliance on foreign technology” and that people unable to be paid, send an invoice, or access government services “are entitled to be worried”. The Australian Computer Society has renewed calls for the federal government to urgently review which critical IT systems rely on a single provider, and where backup options could keep the economy running. The society’s chief executive, Prins Ralston, said the outage had “exposed Australia’s reliance on foreign technology”, particularly on small businesses.