Australians woke this morning up to a global outage affecting numerous Microsoft products used in hundreds of millions of workplaces around the world.
Throughout the day, the tech giant worked to fix the issue causing disruptions to Outlook, Teams and Authenticator and the many other programs businesses, institutions and services rely on.
While some enjoyed a reprieve from responding to emails at work, the outage has exposed how reliant Australians are on technology the country does not control.
Australian Catholic University's IT discipline head Niusha Shafiabady said the outage exposed how dangerous that was.
"When systems fail overseas, Australian businesses can feel the consequences almost immediately," she said.
"We are making our systems more intelligent in Australia, but not necessarily more resilient. Even the smartest systems are useless when the infrastructure they depend on fails."
Here's what people told the ABC about how they experienced the outage.
A widespread outage hit Microsoft software, including Outlook, with many users having trouble accessing their email accounts and encountering other errors across the tech giant's suite of applications.
On Microsoft's Service Health Status site, the company confirmed users may be unable to connect to multiple 365 services, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365, Defender, Planner, To Do, Intune, Purview and Power BI.
