Microsoft 'deeply sorry' for global outage, reports 'broad recovery' of services

Microsoft has apologised for a global outage that disrupted public services and businesses around the world, and has reported a "broad recovery" for Outlook email and other services.

The company ruled out any malicious "cyber or AI" activity as the cause of the outage, which affected several Microsoft products and disrupted healthcare services, delayed corporate earnings reports and left schools struggling to communicate.

"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said on X, adding full services were still being restored after the outage started on Thursday.

"We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents."

Microsoft attributed the disruption to "elevated load" on its infrastructure following a network capacity upgrade. 

The disruption knocked out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, affecting users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa, according to the outage tracker Downdetector.

A top UK trade union said the disruptions had a "serious impact" on the country's healthcare service.

Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union, said the UK's National Health Service staff who received emergency calls were "unable to refer patient details in the normal way," creating a massive backlog. 

As the outage dragged on for hours, airlines in India warned that customer queries may not be getting through.

IndiGo and Akasa Air both said on X that their email support services had been affected and that they may not be able to receive customers' emails.

Immigration New Zealand said the disruption had forced a halt in the processing of all visa applications.

'Significant impact' 

Japan's economy, trade and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa warned of a "significant impact" of the outage, as Microsoft products were used by a "vast number of people".

In London's financial district, several people told AFP that the outage exposed their dependence on Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.

"I think one of the biggest things is Copilot not working," auditor Yashmit Sharma said. "I think this was the main bummer. And Outlook as well, of course."

Sheera, a risk manager at a mid-sized bank who declined to give her last name, said businesses needed to be better prepared for unexpected technology failures.

"I think we need to be a little bit more careful," Sheera said.

"Anything can happen. You wake up and Outlook is not working and it's the main communication we use for our global team."

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," he said, according to ACS publication Information Age.

In an updated statement on Friday, Microsoft said the "incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change".

"We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions."

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.