A global Microsoft 365 outage has disrupted Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and a range of compliance services since early Friday morning, Australian time. The disruption hits the core of how Australian and New Zealand government and industry work. Microsoft Teams is the major collaboration platform across both sectors in the region.
Microsoft’s service status page says users “may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services”.
Potentially impacted services include Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot, Intune, Planner and To Do.
“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a statement. “We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.”
Security and compliance tools are also affected, including Defender XDR, Defender for Office 365 and multiple Microsoft Purview services.
The Purview impact covers authorisation, auto labelling, data loss prevention (DLP), communication compliance and data classification.
Power BI users may intermittently be unable to export reports carrying sensitivity labels to PDF.
The problems began with Exchange Online at 3:17am AEDT, tracked as incident EX1550543. The wider Microsoft 365 impact is tracked as MO1550821.
Outage tracker Downdetector logged more than 130,000 Outlook problem reports at the peak, around 5:15am AEDT. Thousands more reported problems with Teams.
IDM’s own mail stopped syncing around 5am AEDT.
Microsoft initially blamed elevated load across multiple regions. It later said the load came from “a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable” rather than a rise in traffic.
The affected servers were failing automated health checks and being removed from service. Microsoft found a core process on those servers was becoming overwhelmed, causing them to stop responding.
The company paused all deployments and configuration changes. It acknowledged its early actions had not provided the anticipated relief.
In its latest update, at 10:06am AEDT, Microsoft said it had begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service. They are remaining stable so far.
Traffic has been shifted to alternative pathways where possible, with limited recovery in some regions. Microsoft is also applying protective traffic management in one location to reduce load, and will expand it if results are positive.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service,” Microsoft said.
No root cause or restoration time has been published. Microsoft’s next update is due by 11:30am AEDT.
Administrators can track both incidents under Health > Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Those who can’t reach it can check Microsoft’s public service status page.