An expert has said the issue appears similar to the configuration issue which brought down Optus’s network in 2023 with the outage appearing to affect the network layer in Microsoft’s systems. Mark Gregory, associate professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, said when some of the servers have configuration issues, it means customers are forced to share a smaller pool of servers to access the cloud services. He said: If you lose part of that pool, then all of the users are trying to access the remaining servers, and that overloads them. And then they go down. And so you end up with a cascading problem. Then it takes time to find the underlying problem, in this case, a misconfiguration in the network layer. Gregory said it showed companies should invest more in testing environments for configuration changes before deployment in the live network, and said businesses reliant on cloud services such as Microsoft 365 should have backup options. He said: From a global perspect