IBNS-CMEDIA: Millions of users worldwide have been affected by a major Microsoft outage, leaving them unable to access Outlook email, Microsoft Teams meeting tools and several other essential workplace services.
The disruption caused significant inconvenience for businesses, schools and employees across multiple countries. In the United States, frustrated workers at some companies reportedly left their offices early on Thursday. Meanwhile, businesses in Australia struggled to print invoices, while some schools were unable to conduct online classes on Friday, CNN reported.
In its latest update, Microsoft said that changes implemented to improve service reliability were not producing the expected results.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company said.
It added that it was exploring alternative measures to increase system capacity amid sustained traffic management imbalances.
Microsoft asked administrators to follow incident updates under reference numbers EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. The company also provided an alternative update link for users unable to access the admin centre.
In a separate update, Microsoft reported positive results from efforts to restart affected infrastructure and gradually restore server availability.
The outage has affected Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online and email infrastructure. Among the impacted services are Outlook, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Copilot AI.
According to Downdetector, reports of Outlook-related problems peaked at around 130,000. However, the actual scale of the disruption could be significantly larger, as most affected users do not report outages on the platform, CNN reported.
The disruption was not limited to the United States. Microsoft reported service problems across several countries, including Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Meanwhile, Australia’s Home Affairs and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft officials in the country, who did not believe the disruption was caused by a cyberattack.
“They believe that they’re dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told reporters, as quoted by the BBC.
