Good morning, it’s Monday, 16 November. In your Squiz Today…

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🙋🏻‍♀️ This newsletter was written by Andrew Williams, Anna Pykett, and Sophie Felice

Said King Charles III on Sir Elton John’s radio show as the 2 chatted about the 1986 Rock Gala, when the musician performed his classic hit to raise money for charity. Never short of a quip, the 79yo Sir Elton replied: “I’m still sitting now, though…”

There’s every chance you have a fair bit of work to catch up on this morning, after Friday’s massive Microsoft outage that affected 74 countries around the world. Core platforms like Outlook, Teams and Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot all went down, making the average office workday pretty tough (well, tougher than normal). The tech company says everything’s back up and running now - but the cost is still being counted.

Microsoft says the problem was “elevated load” - which means its systems basically buckled under pressure after some servers went down and the rest couldn’t cope. It ruled out a cyberattack or an AI-related thing - but unlike a lot of outages, this one took a long time to fix. Like a lot of work problems, unread emails carry some responsibility there - because email is built to hold and retry messages rather than bounce them, other servers kept piling up mail for Outlook users. So when Outlook finally came back, it was swamped by the backlog. Fun… Here in Oz, schools, government agencies and businesses were all affected - accounting firm RSM reckons that the outage might have cost Australian businesses billions of dollars.

The company is conducting a full investigation into the outage, and says it will release a report once that’s done. And locally, the Australian Computer Society says Oz needs to do a national review of our sovereign IT risk - put another way, whether basing so much of our digital infrastructure on overseas tech companies is worth a rethink. Provided this email has found you well, you should also be on the lookout for phishing (aka fake emails that try and get you to click a link or hand over personal details). Microsoft says there was an active phishing campaign trying to take advantage of the outage by pretending to be Microsoft service notifications - so double-check anything like that.

Researchers at Australia’s Garvan Institute are partnering with Claude to do what wasn’t possible before: analyse genomic data at massive scale to understand how our genes cause rare diseases, and accelerate treatments to cure them. When science and AI come together, the future of human health gets a little brighter. Try Claude here.

PM Anthony Albanese is in the middle of a series of international trips - he’s just signed a defence pact with the Philippines, where he’s attending the 2026 ASEAN Summit. From there, he’ll be racing to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (or APEC) forum, where his presence might be slightly overshadowed by the first-ever 3-way meeting of the leaders of the US, China and Russia, which is set for Thursday our time. And while he’s racing between conferences, he might be watching out for hot mics - he apologised yesterday after being caught talking about, um, men’s anatomy and mobile phone radiation with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen at COP31 last week.

Spare a thought for anyone who was travelling in the US over the weekend, after a tech issue resulted in the country’s longest flight stoppage in 25 years. Flights were grounded for over 4 hours before some domestic flights were allowed to take off - and thousands of flights were cancelled. And before you ask, this one was not Microsoft’s fault - it was the replacement of old copper wires with new fibre ones that ended up disrupting more than 20,000 flights. And if there’s a silver lining at all for US aviation authorities, at least it didn’t happen this weekend, which would have been the one before Thanksgiving - one of the busiest travel times of the year.

The major parties officially launched their campaigns yesterday, with the Coalition in pole position to win government come election day on 28 November. With just 2 weeks to go, it has a lead in all recent published opinion polls in its 4-way contest with Labor, One Nation and the Greens. Yesterday, Coalition leader Jess Wilson focused on crime, saying she’d hire 3,000 new police and reopen closed police stations. Labor Premier Ben Carroll made health the centre of his campaign launch - saying his government would invest in 100,000 extra planned surgeries and 500,000 specialist appointments. If you’re registered to vote in Victoria and you’d like to get it sorted early - you can do that as of Wednesday.

The Aussies were too good in the Rugby League World Cup finals last night, with both our men’s and women’s teams scoring easy victories over New Zealand. First up, the Jillaroos won their fourth World Cup title with a 34-10 win over the Kiwi Ferns, with Jaime Chapman scoring a hat-trick of tries in the first half. While the men’s final was expected to be a bit closer, the Kangaroos ended up winning in very similar fashion - defeating the Kiwis 32-12 after getting off to a flyer with the quickest try in World Cup history. That makes it 4 in a row for the Kangaroos and 13 overall… In the wheelchair final on Friday night, England defeated France to win its third title - and this try from English player Jack Brown is worth checking out.

Today is the first day of Bugs in my Backyard Week, where Aussies are encouraged to head outside and keep a record of all the creepy-crawlies they can clock. It’s a similar idea to the great Aussie Bird Count a few weeks ago - simply head outside, snap some pics of all the bugs you can see and then upload them to this website - and Aussie bug experts will do the rest. By doing so, you can help organisations like the Invasive Species Council keep track of the health of our native species, and potentially even find invasive species that might pose a threat. And don’t worry, you don’t need to know what you’re looking at - if you don’t know your double drummer from your tree lobster, just taking a photo is enough…

The NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 is about to hit a major milestone - after being launched 49 years ago, it’ll become the first human-made object to reach one full light-day from Earth on Wednesday night. That’s 26 billion km, and a hell of a commute… 

A SpaceX rocket has returned to its launch pad in Texas and been ‘caught’ by 2 mechanical arms, making for the first-ever recovery of a spaceship using that method. That’s important for the possibility of reusing rockets - it’s important to recycle, after all… 

And overnight, stargazers might have felt a little bit voyeuristic as they spied Mars and Jupiter ‘kissing’. For a brief period, the 2 planets were unusually close in the night sky - it’s a phenomenon that won’t happen again until July 2029. Alright, get a room, you guys…

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Senate sitting in Federal Parliament (until 19 November) - Labor will be trying to win support for its bills on a domestic gas reserve, a minimum tax on trusts, a digital duty of care and cutting the higher private health insurance rebate for over 65yos - Canberra

9.30am (AEDT) - A lower house public hearing will be held into AI Data Centres in Tasmania - Hobart

11.00am (AEDT) - BlueScope will hold its Annual General Meeting - Wollongong, New South Wales

11.00am (AEDT) - The Tasmania Devils Aussie Rules club will make an announcement about new mascots - Hobart, Tasmania

12.45pm (AEDT) - 17th Annual Governors Awards - Los Angeles 

2.30pm (AEDT) - A funeral will be held for former Beaconsfield miner Todd Russell - Youngtown, Tasmania

11.45pm (AEDT) - Grammy Award nominations released, watch the livestream here

49th ASEAN Summit begins, PM Anthony Albanese will be in attendance (until 18 November) - Manila 

The 2026 Australian Institute of International Affairs National Conference - the theme is 'Whiplash! Disruption as the New Normal in International Affairs', Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles will be the keynote speaker at the gala - Canberra 

Bugs in my Backyard Week begins (until 22 November)

International Day for Tolerance 

World Sanfilippo Awareness Day

Anniversary of:

• the foundation of Havana at its current site after settlers abandoned earlier mosquito-plagued locations (1519)

• the establishment of a Royal Charter marking New Zealand as a separate colony within the British Empire, severing its link to New South Wales (1840)

• the founding of Qantas (1920)

• the founding of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (1945)

• the first case of SARS virus recorded in China, though it wasn't identified until later (2002)

• the debut of Lionel Messi for FC Barcelona (2003)

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