Microsoft outage highlights risks of relying on a single technology provider

A global Microsoft outage this week disrupted email and other workplace tools, plunging business chatter and everyday services into disarray worldwide and highlighting the risks of depending on one of just a few major providers of essential technology.

Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, were interrupted. As the outage entered its second day Friday, Microsoft said it saw “encouraging recovery progress.” But the company also warned that “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery” may persist for some users.

“We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us,” Microsoft wrote in a social media update.

The disruptions offer the latest example of the cascading problems that can erupt when so many communications and technology platforms depend on the same provider. Some lawmakers outside the U.S. have also argued that the outage shows the consequences of overreliance on American tech.

“With no emails coming or going, many office workers feel like they are having a virtual snow day,” said Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science.

Still, he added, “this problem serves to emphasise the dependence we have built on one company’s digital infrastructure, and may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem.”

The global reach of the outage was swift. After problems first emerged midday Thursday in the U.S., online tracker Downdetector said it received outage reports from 74 countries and territories within an hour.

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The total number of people affected was not clear, but Microsoft said in January it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services.

Microsoft has scrambled to recover services

A series of posts by Microsoft 365 on X suggested its engineers struggled to get the problem under control for some time, drawing teasing from other companies and users alike. But the tech giant has said there is “no indication” that the disruptions were caused by malicious activity, specifically noting Friday that the outage was not related to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.

Microsoft said a technical issue arose during an upgrade that followed “a recent network change.” The company added that it restored services gradually, which took longer.

As Microsoft addressed issues affecting its Exchange Online mailboxes, it earlier cited a failure that it said caused a number of its servers to be “unexpectedly unavailable” during automated checks.

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For Outlook, many users said they couldn’t send and receive emails, or had trouble loading their inboxes altogether. Those problems piled up across much of the world into Friday.

By Friday morning in the U.S., Microsoft said email queues were “significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.” Still, it warned of potential intermittent access and ongoing delays.

On Thursday, the company said it had “successfully restored” Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.

Disruptions piled up from the courtroom to the pharmacy

In Britain, the outage brought a halt to a trial in Manchester. Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home because of delays that he said illustrated the danger of the court’s reliance on technology.

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The British government said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services but that “robust contingency plans” were in place to minimise disruption.

British police said they were unable to receive crime reports online and urged people to phone in urgent requests. The outage also affected some law enforcement in the U.S. The sheriff’s office in Colorado’s Arapahoe County, for example, noted that online bond payments were affected.

Also in Britain, the National Pharmacy Association warned customers of delays in getting medication. The outage affected the National Health Service and threatened to prevent doctors from emailing prescriptions to pharmacies.

“Please bear with your pharmacy teams today, where waits may be longer than normal, and there may be delays to some prescriptions,” a spokesperson said.

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Governments in Singapore, Japan, Greece and Norway said the outage affected some of their operations, including email communications for certain ministries or agencies.

And of course, businesses were wracked with disruptions. Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminium company, said his business couldn’t receive updates from its U.S. customers through Outlook. If the situation dragged on, the trouble could “impact the production timeline,” he said.

Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also saw disruptions.

OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.

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Outage has parallels with 2024 shutdown

Some have drawn parallels 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.

Governments and institutions in Western Europe, in particular, have been trying to reduce their reliance on services provided by a few big U.S. tech services in their continuing push for “digital sovereignty.” This week’s outage renewed some of those calls.

British lawmaker Chi Onwurah, who chairs the Science and Technology Committee in Parliament, said the Microsoft outage “only serves to highlight once again the lack of resilience in the U.K.’s digital infrastructure, and the dangers that this dependency can pose to our security, economy and public services.”

She said her committee has previously warned that the U.K. is “hugely dependent” on a small number of U.S.-based technology providers, preventing homegrown alternatives from developing.

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Florian Druckenthaner, a spokesperson for Germany’s digitisation ministry, said the government’s IT security agency believes German business was widely affected, but there were no reports of major disruption at the government level.

Regardless, Druckenthaner said, the outage shows “the significance of building up redundancies and alternatives. We are working on that.”