Last Thursday, Microsoft experienced a massive global outage of Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, which affected thousands of users in the US and then spread to the Asia-Pacific region, increasing the number of affected users to tens of thousands of users. Despite the efforts made, the failure has been going on for about 12 hours, writes Reuters.
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According to the Downdetector website, which monitors failures in the operation of Internet resources, the peak of messages about problems in Outlook occurred at 21:00 Moscow time – about 130 thousand messages about problems in Outlook were recorded in the United States.
Microsoft said in the notice that Microsoft 365 features that depend on Exchange Online and email are affected, while non-Exchange Online components function as normal.
The company added that there is “no evidence” of any malicious activity that could have caused the outage. According to Microsoft, the problems are related to the operation of the servers.
In its latest update, the company said it has made adjustments to the affected servers, but this has not resulted in stable restoration of services. At the same time, in the regions where adjustments were applied, a partial restoration of work is observed.
“We are analyzing what additional measures can be taken to improve the overall stability of the infrastructure,” the company said on social network X.
The problems have affected government agencies in Australia, Japan and the US, as well as companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said at a briefing that Microsoft believes “the situation is in some ways reminiscent of the CrowdStrike incident, where an update didn’t go as planned.” “The problems they’ve encountered… primarily affect email systems,” he added.
A massive CrowdStrike software outage in 2024 disabled millions of computers across the globe, paralyzing technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports. This time, Australian intelligence agencies and the federal police were among the organizations affected by the failure. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage affected government information systems infrastructure.
Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air also reported disruptions to their customer support services using email. The outage also disrupted fund management processes at Taiwanese brokerage firms, life insurance companies and investment trusts. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which had planned to report third-quarter financial results on November 12, pushed back its report to November 16, citing disruptions caused by a global outage of Microsoft systems.
Microsoft has already experienced outages with 365 services in January of this year, as well as in October last year.
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