Australia investigates Microsoft outage disrupting businesses and agencies

Australia's cyber security coordinator is investigating a major Microsoft outage that has disrupted email and online services for businesses, government agencies and other organisations across the country. Microsoft confirmed users were experiencing issues with several Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Teams and SharePoint, with more than 4,400 problems reported on Downdetector by Friday morning. The company said some servers had become unresponsive and was investigating recent configuration changes as a possible cause. Experts noted the outage highlighted risks of relying on a few major cloud providers, as Microsoft worked to restart affected servers and implement automated detection systems. The company said it was applying fixes to restore services.