Microsoft's Friday the 13th outage shows the cost of running the whole office on one cloud

Résumé détaillé

Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and a growing list of Microsoft 365 services fell over for Australian workers this morning. Microsoft says there's no sign of a cyber attack...

Alex Zaharov-Reutt, Global AI and Technology Editor | Published 13 Nov 2026

Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and a growing list of Microsoft 365 services fell over for Australian workers this morning. Microsoft says there's no sign of a cyber attack and that recovery will be gradual. Here's what broke, why the fix is crawling, and the backup plan every business should already have.

It's Friday the 13th, and Microsoft has given Australia – and the world - qa live demonstration of how much of the working week runs through one company's servers.

I joined ABC NewsRadio this morning to talk through the outage, and the vox pops the station aired just before my segment captured the mood nicely. One worker told ABC NewsRadio that without email, "we'll be on the phones just like back in the day." Another worker told the station they were hoping someone at the office had found a workaround, adding: "I don't know if my handwriting will pass."

Here's my radio interview, upon which this article is based, please read on below thereafter!

Microsoft first flagged trouble at 12:54pm US Eastern time on Thursday, which was 4:54am AEDT on Friday. The Microsoft 365 Status account on X initially described problems reaching Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas, then widened that to users in any region.

By the time most Australians were reaching for their first coffee, the list of affected services had grown to Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Defender XDR, Planner, To Do, Intune, Purview, Power BI and Universal Print. I was refreshing Microsoft's status page during my interview and watched Universal Print get added while I was talking (which tells you the incident was still growing at that point).

Exchange Online is the server engine that delivers business email into Outlook. Teams, for anyone who thinks of it purely as a video calling app, is also the chat system many organisations use the way families use WhatsApp.

When all three go at once…

Début de l'article, extrait de iTWire. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.