‘Looks like we’ll have to talk to people’: Australia sent back to time before email with major Microsoft outage

Government services and schools impacted by Outlook and Teams issue as company says fix not ‘taking as expected’

• Microsoft struggles to fix huge outage affecting Outlook and Teams

Australian schools, courts and government services have been hurled back in time to how business used to be done after a global Microsoft outage caused emails and online meetings to go dark.

Australians began reporting issues with Microsoft 365 – which includes Outlook and Teams – just before 5am AEST on Friday, according to Down Detector. The problem appeared to peak at 9.22am with more than 5,500 reports of problems, including trouble opening and sending emails, before reports began to dip.