‘Overloaded servers’ caused massive Microsoft outage, says computer expert

The Microsoft outage which has hit millions of people around the world was caused by “overloaded servers,” says a tech expert.

Bob O'Donnell, founder of TECHnalysis Research, explained that this would have led to "overloaded servers".

He told the BBC: "A Microsoft exec posted on social media...’It is not cyber. It's not malicious’. It's simply they've overloaded these servers.

"Now, it's not a good sign. I mean, let's be honest. And I think the numbers are going to be millions.”

Other experts outlined possible additional or other reasons for the outage.

Tom Worthington, Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing at the Australian National University, said: “Rather than a cyber attack, most likely this was caused by an update to software which contained a bug.”

Dr Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, added: "The Microsoft outage appears to have been caused by a misconfiguration of networking systems and infrastructure.”

Microsoft is scrambling to find new ways to restore services after a global outage has left hundreds of thousands of users worldwide without access to emails and Teams as it admitted fixes were not going ‘as expected’

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Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday.

Issues were still being reported at 3am the following morning.

Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.

“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” he wrote on X.

“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”

Affected products included instant messaging service Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of its Cloud services, among others.

An error message is shown when trying to access Outlook

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In an update on Friday, the tech giant said that although it had managed to get servers operating multiple times overnight UK time, those servers had crashed.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported issues.

Microsoft said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said.

Microsoft has been hit with outages (Niall Carson/PA)

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In Britain, Whitehall computer experts were assessing how badly the Government was affected by the outage.

"We're looking across Government at the moment as to the impact of Microsoft services as one of the key providers, not just for Government services but industry services. We recognise that the outage has potential to cause a lot of trouble," Defence Minister Luke Pollard told Times Radio.

“There's an awful lot of frustrated people this morning trying to get into their systems, trying to access their emails and other services that Microsoft provide. I want to see this fixed.”

Multiple governments around the world also reported Microsoft outages, including in Australia, India and Japan.