Microsoft’s cloud services went down for users around the world on Friday, knocking out email, workplace chat and office software for hours and catching up Australia’s spy agency and federal police in the disruption.
Australia’s Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police were among the organisations affected, their chiefs confirmed at a news conference in Canberra. The Australian government activated a formal agreement with Microsoft to ensure the country’s services were given priority in the restoration effort.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had told him it did not believe the outage was caused by a cyber attack. The company had earlier fixed a separate disruption to Teams in North America, saying its impact had been fully resolved, before the wider problem spread to Microsoft 365 services in other regions.
The scale of the disruption was visible in the flood of reports from users. Outage-tracking site Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook at 1.27pm Eastern Time on Thursday, alongside more than 46,000 reports for Microsoft 365 and about 3,000 for Teams. Those figures count user reports rather than confirmed affected accounts, so the true number of people hit may differ.
For Australia, the outage carried an extra edge. The country’s domestic intelligence agency and its federal police both rely on Microsoft’s services, and the government moved quickly to invoke the priority-restoration agreement it holds with the company. Burke said the first formal cyber agreement he had signed on Australia’s behalf was with Microsoft, and that it had now been activated to make sure Australian interests were prioritised.
Microsoft is one of the world’s largest providers of workplace software, and its 365 suite underpins email and collaboration for governments and businesses in almost every country. An outage that lasts for hours can stall meetings, delay decisions and leave staff locked out of the documents they need to work.
The cause of the outage has not been publicly explained in detail. Microsoft told the Australian government it did not believe a cyber attack was behind it, but that assessment reached the public through the minister rather than in a direct statement from the company, and no technical explanation had been given by the time of publication.
Sources: Reuters, “Australia’s spy agency, federal police hit by Microsoft outage” (https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/australias-spy-agency-federal-police-hit-by-microsoft-outage-2026-11-13/) and “Microsoft 365, Outlook down for thousands of US users, Downdetector shows” (https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-365-outlook-down-thousands-us-users-downdetector-shows-2026-11-12/).
