Technology and Scienceupdated 17m ago2 min read
Archive photo · 8 December 2010Microsoft Works to Restore Outlook, Teams and Copilot After Global Outage in 74 Countries
“the incident was not the result of any ‘malicious’ activity.”
“The outage has cut off access to Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.”
Photo: NASA ISS astronauts / US federal government, Public domain · Cropped for layout
This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot across 74 countries worldwide. Microsoft says outage was not caused by malicious activity and is restoring services with patches.
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Outage hits 74 countries
Microsoft’s global outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot across 74 countries, with the BBC describing “connectivity problems” affecting Microsoft 365 services in at least 74 countries. Microsoft said the outage was not a cyber-security incident and was caused by a technical issue, while the BBC reported that services including Teams, Outlook and AI software Copilot were being restored almost 24 hours since issues first surfaced. Ars Technica reported that the outage started midday Thursday and remained ongoing Friday morning, and it quoted Microsoft’s 365 Status account confirming, “Recovery actions are ongoing.”
Ars Technica also reported that Microsoft extended email timeout to 48 hours to help preserve delayed mail, and it cited Ciaran Martin saying the disruption looks like “one of the biggest outages of all time.” The BBC added that Microsoft warned “some users may still experience intermittent issues” and said it was continuing to restore service to remaining customers and regions.
Why recovery took so long
Prof James Ferryman of the University of Reading said Microsoft’s disclosed details pointed to a failure in the part of its servers that sets up secure connections, warning that “once that happens the server just stops answering.” Ferryman said the failure “snowballs,” because “huge numbers of phones and laptops keep trying to get back in,” and he said Microsoft could not “just turn it all back on at once.” Troy Hunt told the BBC that Microsoft is “a massive part of the internet backbone” and said the outage “reminds us how critical email still is.”
The BBC reported that Microsoft attributed the ongoing outage to an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade, and it quoted Microsoft saying, “We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.” Ars Technica reported that Microsoft blamed failed server health checks and said on a status page it had “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.”
Businesses and governments scramble
Ars Technica said businesses, hospitals, police departments, and schools were scrambling to work around the outage, and it reported that in Japan it disrupted government IT infrastructure, according to deputy chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki. DW reported that the outage affected companies and agencies around the world, and it quoted a union leader saying Britain’s state health service, the NHS, was facing a “serious impact” on its operations. DW also reported that Deutsche Bahn said the outage made it difficult to send out timetables for diverted trains, and it said a spokesperson for Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization said the outage was having a significant impact on German businesses.
The BBC reported that Microsoft warned of continued “delayed email delivery,” and it said the company had extended the “timeout window” to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages. Ars Technica said Microsoft estimated in January that total paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions exceeded 450 million, and it noted that it was unclear how many users were affected by the disruption.