The Microsoft outage could be a disaster for the Australian economy that forces some small businesses to close, with costs expected to run into the billions of dollars, experts have warned.

The US software company has said it is “deeply sorry” for a widespread outage that caused disruption to millions of users, organisations and businesses across the globe – and that it has “addressed the underlying issue”.

The company said the outage was a “technical issue” not related to cyber-attacks or AI agents, and that it continued to gradually restore services.

Experts have said the outage exposes “Australia’s reliance on foreign technology” and that people unable to be paid, send an invoice, or access government services “are entitled to be worried”.

The outage of Microsoft’s services, which began on Friday morning , lasted roughly 18 hours before services started to recover.…