Jakarta, ThedailyID — Australia’s intelligence agency and federal police were among the organizations affected by a global Microsoft service disruption on Friday, November 13. The Australian government said it had prioritized service recovery across the country.
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Director-General Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett confirmed that their agencies had experienced disruptions during a press conference.
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had informed him that the company did not believe the disruption was caused by a cyberattack.
Burke added that the government had activated an agreement with Microsoft to prioritize Australia’s recovery process.
“Microsoft has done good security work as a company. When it comes to formal cybersecurity agreements that I signed on behalf of Australia, the first agreement was made with Microsoft,” Burke said, according to Reuters.
“That agreement was activated today to ensure Australia’s interests receive the appropriate priority in this process,” he added.
The disruption affected several Microsoft services worldwide, including Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Teams.
In the United States, tens of thousands of users reported difficulties accessing email services, Outlook, the Copilot AI assistant, and other essential applications.
Downdetector recorded a peak of 128,874 outage reports around 1 p.m. local time on Thursday, November 12, equivalent to 1 a.m. Western Indonesian Time on Friday. Outlook accounted for nearly 130,000 reports, while Copilot recorded almost 6,000.
Microsoft said it was working to reduce the impact of the disruption.
“We are aggressively pursuing all avenues to mitigate the impact. We have paused all deployments, redirected additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and restarted affected servers to restore operations,” Microsoft said in a post on X on Friday.
However, disruptions continued across several Microsoft services. Reports reached another peak of more than 47,000 around 1:20 p.m. local time, shortly before 2 p.m.
Outlook also recorded nearly 13,000 outage reports at around the same time.
“While we are working to mitigate the impact, we have confirmed that this issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region,” Microsoft said.
