Washington (United States) (AFP) – Microsoft on Friday apologized for a global outage that disrupted public services and businesses around the world, as it reported a “broad recovery” for Outlook email and other services. The company ruled out any malicious “cyber or AI” activity as the cause of the outage, which affected several Microsoft products and disrupted health care services, delayed corporate earnings reports, and left schools struggling to communicate.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said on X, adding that full services were still being restored after the outage started on Thursday. “We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents.”
The disruption knocked out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, affecting users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, according to the outage tracker Downdetector. A top UK trade union said the disruptions had a “serious impact” on the country’s health care service. National Health Service staff receiving emergency calls were “unable to refer patient details in the normal way,” creating a massive backlog, said Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union.
As the outage dragged on for hours, airlines in India warned that customer queries may not be getting through. IndiGo and Akasa Air both said on X that their email support services had been affected and that they may not be able to receive customers’ emails. Immigration New Zealand said the disruption had forced a halt in the processing of all visa applications.
Japan’s economy, trade, and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa warned of a “significant impact” of the outage as the Microsoft products were used by a “vast number of people.” In London’s financial district, several people interviewed by AFP said the outage exposed their dependence on Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant.
“I think one of the biggest things is Copilot not working,” said Yashmit Sharma, 26, an auditor. “I think this was the main bummer. And Outlook as well, of course.” Sheera, 40, a risk manager at a mid-sized bank, said businesses needed to be better prepared for unexpected technology failures. “I think we need to be a little bit more careful,” said Sheera, declining to give her last name. “Anything can happen: you wake up and Outlook is not working and it’s the main communication we use for our global team.”
The Australian Computer Society (ACS) called for a national review of sovereign IT risk, with CEO Prins Ralston saying that small businesses may not have a workaround when Outlook fails. “We need to know the systems that keep this country running won’t simply fall over without notice,” Ralston said, according to ACS publication Information Age.
On Thursday, Microsoft attributed the disruption to “elevated load” on its infrastructure. In an updated statement on Friday, it said the “incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.” “We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.”
Reports of problems on Downdetector had begun to decline by 0900 GMT. Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports “in the Americas,” but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.” Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.
© 2024 AFP
