Cyberattack or AI gone rogue? What senior Microsoft official said on mega outage

Microsoft outage: As cyberattack and rogue AI models attack theories go viral, CoPilot EVP Charles Lamanna confirms what has not likely caused the outage

Microsoft 365 services is facing a massive outage impacting users worldwide. The outage which began late November 12, has left millions around the world without access to Outlook email, Teams meeting tools and other staples of modern office life.

Banks, several government departments and courts in multiple countries including the US, Japan and others are affected. As the outage escalated, some came up with conspiracy theories about what may have caused the outage. While some called it a cyberattack, others said that the Microsoft 365 outage was caused after an AI agent went rogue. The company has debunked these theories clarifying that there is “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”.Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna shared a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) saying that the company “regrets” today’s outages and is working to address the issue.

Here’s what the Microsoft executive said

Sharing the post, Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft said:

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

Microsoft says changes applied to fix outage not working 'as expected'

In a post shared on November 13, Microsoft admitted that the initial changes applied to fix the current Microsoft 365 outage is “not taking as expected” and the software giant is “identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied”."We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://msft.it/6013xBHsf if the admin center is not available to you," reads the post.