Washington (United States) (AFP) – Microsoft said “malicious” activity was not to blame for an Outlook outage that has left users around the world without its crucial services on Friday, but reported making headway in fixing the massive disruption. Businesses, governments, and likely millions of individuals have been without services like Outlook email for over half a day, triggering wide-ranging consequences. Airlines in India warned that customer queries may not be getting through, and New Zealand said the outage forced a halt in the processing of visa applications, while Japan cautioned the impact would be broad.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, though by 0900 GMT some signs of progress showed in the decline of disruption reports on Downdetector, which tracks digital outages. In a 0730 GMT update, Microsoft said it was “seeing positive results for server stability” after applying a software patch, and was “working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online.” The tech giant also noted that it was “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident.” However, the company has reported having difficulties in fully restoring service, despite the fixes it has put in place. “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said on X around 0300 GMT, without saying when service was expected to be back to normal.
The disruption went global within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported. A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Japan’s economy, trade and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa said there was no doubt that the outage would cause a “significant impact.” “Since this software is used by a vast number of people, we will closely monitor the situation and take every possible measure to address it,” Akazawa told Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air each said on X that their email support services have been affected, and that they may not be able to receive customers’ emails.
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. Immigration New Zealand said it has paused the processing of all visa applications until further notice because of the global Microsoft outage.
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. “We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” the company wrote on X. “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” it added. Thousands of users also reported issues with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector.
© 2024 AFP
