Schools and universities using cloud-based administration services have been impacted by a global Microsoft outage that appears to have been sparked by an update issue.
Within an hour, the disruption spread across 74 countries, with as many as 20,000 reports lodged every minute.
Outage website Down Detector showed nearly 130,000 reports of issues worldwide affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive.
Parents and carers have reportedly been receiving messages from educational institutions advising that they are currently unable to send or receive emails.
At Longreach School of the Air, live online lessons and digital communications were suspended “until further notice” for students learning remotely from sheep and cattle stations across central Queensland.
Ali Yavari, an associate professor at Swinburne University of Technology, warned of heightened cybersecurity risks during the outage window.
“Out of frustration or urgency, employees may turn to personal email accounts, unmanaged devices or unapproved messaging and file-sharing services to keep working,” Yavari told ABC News, adding that once sensitive information moves outside an organisation's security controls, the result can be unauthorised disclosure, loss of oversight and privacy or confidentiality breaches.
“Those consequences can outlast the outage itself.”
Just after 10am AEDT, Microsoft posted an update saying customers could expect a “gradual recovery”.
“We're returning a portion of affected servers to the service, and they remain stable so far,” the company stated on its X account. “We're also shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible and observing limited recovery.”