Australia's spy agency and its federal police were among the organisations caught up in a global Microsoft outage on Friday, 13 November 2026, with the government triggering a formal agreement with the company to make sure Australian services were restored first.

Users around the world were unable to access Microsoft services for hours, including Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams. In Australia, the disruption hit government departments, schools, courts and health services, as well as the country's top security and law enforcement bodies.

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Director-General Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett confirmed at a news conference in Sydney that their organisations had been affected.

Mr Burgess said the spy agency's systems operate on several levels and that it had been affected on one level, but not completely. He said the impact ASIO was dealing with was very much on its email system, after being briefed by Australia's national cybersecurity co-ordinator and by Microsoft on Friday morning.

Government activates Microsoft agreement

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, who appeared at the news conference with Mr Burgess and Commissioner Barrett, said Microsoft had told him it did not believe the outage was caused by a cyber attack.

Mr Burke said the government had activated a formal cyber agreement with Microsoft to ensure Australia received priority in the restoration of services.

"There is good security work that is done with Microsoft as a business and when it came to the formal cyber agreements which I've signed on behalf of Australia, the first of those was with Microsoft," Mr Burke said at the news conference. "That agreement has in fact been activated today to make sure that we get appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests in this."

Thousands of Australians report problems

Australians began reporting problems with Microsoft 365, which includes Outlook and Teams, just before 5am local time on Friday, according to the monitoring website DownDetector. Reports peaked at 9.22am, with more than 5,500 Australian users reporting problems with Outlook, while thousands of others reported issues with Teams, the AI assistant Copilot and other Microsoft 365 products.

Queensland Health, which relies on Microsoft email for a workforce of 130,000 people, was also hit, according to the ABC. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company had no indication of a cyber attack and suggested the issue could be related to a configuration change to its servers that was causing some to become overloaded and taken offline. In an update later on Friday, the company said efforts to fix the issue were not taking as expected.

The outage is a reminder of how heavily public services depend on a small number of technology providers. A separate outage in 2024 affected workplaces, airports and national security services around the world after a faulty software update crashed almost 8.5 million computers.

Frequently asked questions

Was the Microsoft outage a cyber attack? Microsoft told the Australian government it did not believe the outage was caused by a cyber attack, and a company spokesperson said there was no indication of one. The company pointed to a possible configuration change affecting its servers.

Which Australian agencies were affected? ASIO and the Australian Federal Police both confirmed they were affected. The disruption also hit Queensland Health, schools, courts and other government services across the country.

What services stopped working? Microsoft 365 services were affected worldwide, including Outlook email, the Teams messaging app and the Copilot AI assistant.

Sources: Reuters and AAP.