Microsoft’s short-lived optimism as 'update gone awry' hits Australian agencies

Detailed summary

Microsoft quickly removed a positive update on its Outlook outage but maintains it is monitoring if repair efforts are working.

Schools, businesses, courts and government agencies are still being impacted by a global Microsoft outage, as the tech giant says they are trying get services back up and running.

The company had expressed optimisim, saying it was "seeing positive results" in restarting impacted systems, but shortly afterwards removed that detail from its updates.

It then stated "partial recovery" had emerged in some regions but it wasn't leading to "sustained recovery".

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says the latest information is that Microsoft outage is centred "very much on email systems",

Burke told reporters on Friday morning that he had spoken with Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, the National Cyber Security Coordinator, and Jane Livesey, president of Microsoft Australia and New Zealand.

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He said Microsoft believed it was dealing with "an update that has gone awry" similar to the CrowdStrike outage in July 2024.

"One thing we had with CrowdStrike was we also have a whole lot of downstream impacts where it was affecting the capability of a whole range of other products quite separate from that," Burke said.

Governments in the Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania and Western Australia said they have been impacted by the outage. Service NSW said some transactions are unavailable and has encouraged customers to delay their visit or complete transactions online where possible.

Opening of the article, excerpted from SBS News. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.