SA Govt update as Microsoft outage disrupts thousands
Thousands of Microsoft users have been unable to use key tools with platforms, such as Teams and Outlook affected by the meltdown.
The State Government has released a statement to those being impacted by a global Microsoft outage.
“Microsoft is currently experiencing a global outage impacting Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender. This means access to some SA Government services, emails and programs may be affected,” it said in a statement.
Those affected were urged to contact government agencies directly. SA Health issued a statement saying patient services were not impacted “at this stage”, adding that its electronic record system was unaffected but some external referrals for outpatient services that rely on emails maybe delayed.
It said business continuity planning “is underway in case the outage stems to other systems”.
Key Microsoft tools have been down for thousands users according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com, with the disruption also hitting connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services.
Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams have all been affected.
There were more than 97,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Outlook, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. The actual number of affected users may vary.
Downdetector also recorded more than 38,000 user reports of problems with Microsoft 365 and about 4,500 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams.
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” Microsoft said in a statement.
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Its team has paused all deployments, is moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and is restarting affected servers to return them to service, the company added.
Microsoft said earlier in the day it had fixed a Teams disruption affecting users in North America and that the impact had been fully resolved. The company later said the issue may also affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in other regions.
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.
Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
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