Australian officials ‘not worried’ by Microsoft outage or reliance on software as issue linked to awry update
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft has briefed him that their outage on Friday was not a cyber incident and instead seemed to have steamed from an update issue.
Top Australian officials say they’re “not worried” by the Microsoft outage on Friday and wouldn’t urge people to move away from the software for digital sovereignty.
The widespread outage had led to a bumpy start to Australians’ work day — with key office tools such as Outlook, Teams and Co-Pilot impacted.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke on Friday said the global tech firm had briefed him that it was “not a cyber incident” and that it seemed to have steamed from an update issue.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.He said the incident had been likened to the CrowdStrike global IT outage in 2024 which caused an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers to crash and display what was dubbed as “the Blue Screen of Death”.
“The perspective of Microsoft at this stage: they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event,” Mr Burke said.
Mr Burke said he had received briefings on Friday morning from Microsoft Australia and New Zealand president Jane Livesey and Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Lieutenant General Michelle Michelle McGuinness.
“They believe that they are dealing, in some ways, similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry,” Mr Burke said on Friday.
“In terms of the impact so far, the impact that they are dealing with very much is very much on email systems.
“One of the things that we had with CrowdStrike was we then had a whole lot of downstream impacts where it… affected the capability of a whole range of other products quite separate from that.”
The perspective of Microsoft at this stage: they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event.
ASIO boss Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said both their agencies were impacted by the outage but said they operate on multiple platforms so could find a work-around.
“We operate on multiple levels,” Mr Burgess said.
Mr Burgess also disagreed when asked if Australia was too reliant on a single software provider.
“No, I don’t. There are multiple providers. No, I’m not worried about that,” he said.
In a statement on Friday morning, Microsoft said they were investigating and working to mitigate impact.
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service,” it stated.
