Multibillion-dollar deal blasted as tech blunder derails public service work

Resumen detallado

The APS has been thrown a productivity curveball.

The Albanese government's decision to send $3 billion worth of IT contracts to Microsoft under single-seller arrangements has come under scrutiny as a global outage locked almost 200,000 public servants out of their emails on Friday.

ACT independent senator David Pocock said the "productivity-killing" outage showed that "we need to rely more on sovereign Australian companies and diversify suppliers".

"[It's] an example of the type of risk experts and local companies have been warning about," Senator Pocock said.

While many public servants sought workarounds to do their jobs, disruptions to Teams, Sharepoint and Copilot meant the outage's impact extended beyond email.

Senator Pocock called on the government to update the Commonwealth Procurement Rules to "upweight sovereign capability and retained economic benefit" as the APS came to rely "more and more on software systems for service delivery, including artificial intelligence tools."

As Microsoft scrambled to find the cause and implement a fix, the Australian government activated a Memorandum of Understanding requiring it to work to "prioritise the recovery of Australia's digital economy as soon as possible to significant tech outages or digital disruptions within the Microsoft ecosystem".

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke assured the public on Friday that there were no signs a cyber attack was to blame. The cause of the IT meltdown was still under investigation, but it was thought to have been sparked by an unspecified "configuration change" late on Thursday.

A tweak to a line of code or a major software update appears to have begun failing automated server health checks, setting off a chain reaction of global outages that crashed Microsoft's network.

The Canberra Times revealed in September that the government had signed almost $3 billion worth of technology contracts with Microsoft reseller Data#3, which the Digital Transformation Agency this year made the whole-of-government IT supplier in a move aimed at securing…

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