Microsoft Outage halts email, Teams and more as Australian business consider a Microsoft Long Weekend

Send everyone home, and if they’re at home you won’t be hearing from them – that’s the plan today as Microsoft slips into the fifth hour of a global outage of it’s core Microsoft 365 Services coming in the middle of the US workday and right at the start of a Friday workday in Australia.

The list of potentially impacted services is long:

• Exchange Online
• Microsoft Teams
• SharePoint Online
• Microsoft Copilot 365
• Microsoft Defender XDR
• Microsoft Planner
• Microsoft To Do
• Microsoft Intune
• Microsoft Defender for Office 365
• Microsoft Purview: Multiple Purview services including Authorization, Auto Labelling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Communication Compliance, and Data Classification are impacted.
• Power BI: All users may intermittently be unable to export reports with MIP sensitivity labels to PDF in Power BI.
• Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center: Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory.

For businesses and organisations who use Microsoft 365 for these services, it’s a productivity disaster. Particularly given in workplaces where work from home is allowed on some days, Friday is one of the most common days to work from home.

Microsoft has not said what caused the outage, but are ruling out “Excess traffic” as a factor, something that might point to an external Denial of Service attack.

Instead, their messaging has hints of self-blame about it, with talk of rolling back software updates and pausing any configuration changes while restoring services.

Notably “In parallel, we’re assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.”

Their public messaging doesn’t enstill much hope of a swift recovery either, Microsoft saying “We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.”

So, log off, go see a movie, take a long weekend – you deserve it, and besides, what else can you do?