source : the age
Queensland public servants’ communication channels have been crippled by the global Microsoft outage but the state government insists emergency health services and patient care have not been compromised.
Government departments do not have access to platforms including Outlook, Teams and Copilot as a result of the outage.
Health and Ambulance Services Minister Tim Nicholls confirmed the health system was run on Microsoft Outlook, but maintained the outage had no significant impact.
Queensland Health has 135,000 staff members across 16 hospital and health services, who cannot email each other because of the outage.
“As we all know, we got up early this morning to find the Outlook system was not performing as anticipated and as we all expected to do every day when we log in, sign in, and start looking at what the day ahead holds,” Nicholls said about 9.30am on Friday.
“We have stood up the State Health Emergency Command Centre, and we are monitoring the situation continuously, and have been since early this morning, when the outage was first alerted to Queensland Health.”
Nicholls said no disruption had been detected to patient care or the delivery of services in hospitals, and the Triple Zero service was not affected.
“People can have confidence that Triple Zero and the dispatch service continue to operate as intended,” he said.
“There are back-up systems in place, but we have not had need to call on those back-up systems. So we continue to monitor the system.”
The Queensland Police Service was dealing with the outage by adopting an “old school” approach using phones and radios, a spokesman said.
The Queensland Education Department was unable to access emails, and families across Brisbane were sent texts from their schools advising them that emails were not working.
A department spokesperson advised parents to keep an eye on their school’s social media pages, and only call for urgent inquiries.
Brisbane City Council uses Outlook, and was also affected by the outage.
