Microsoft struggles to fix services in global outage

From Asia to the US, Microsoft’s outage involving services such as Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.

The outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and e-mail services, it said. Services including Outlook, Teams and artificial intelligence assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.

The extent of the outage was not clear, but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.

The Microsoft Outlook logo on a laptop is pictured in Warsaw yesterday.

Photo: AFP

The company yesterday indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress, saying it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements,” and that there was “incremental improvement in several workloads,” but problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company’s services and anecdotal reports on social media.

Microsoft said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure,” adding that there was no indication the outage was caused by malicious activity.

A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.

Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.

An earlier post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote.

In a pair of more recent updates, Microsoft said “we’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.”

“Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases,” the company said in a second post. “We’re seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.”

The British government said it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services, but that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption.

British police said they were unable to receive crime reports online and urged people to call emergency responders if needed.

Australian Minister of Home Affairs Tony Burke said Microsoft had likened the widespread disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. That outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers.

“They [Microsoft] don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways [with something] similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said.