Microsoft says it is 'deeply sorry' after widespread outages cause global chaos

Microsoft said Friday it was seeing "improvements" for Outlook email and other services amid an outage that was disrupting public services and businesses around the world.

In an update, the company noted "broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia-Pacific".

Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications with hundreds of ⁠millions of users. The outage prevented people from performing essential functions such as sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.

The outage also disrupted health care services, delayed corporate earnings reports and left schools struggling to communicate.

A top UK trade union said the disruptions were having a "serious impact" on the country's health care service.

National Health Service staff receiving emergency calls were "unable to refer patient details in the normal way which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos", said Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union.

In London's financial district, several people interviewed by AFP said the outage exposed their reliance on Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.

"I think one of the biggest things is Copilot not working, and you can sort of see the dependency now on Copilot," said Yashmit Sharma, 26, an auditor. "I think this was the main bummer. And Outlook as well, of course."

Sheera, 40, a risk manager at a mid-sized bank, said businesses needed to be better prepared for unexpected technology failures.

"I think we need to be a little bit more careful," said Sheera, declining to give her last name. "Anything can happen: you wake up and Outlook is not working and it's the main communication we use for our global team."

'Elevated load'

Microsoft attributed the disruption to "elevated load" on its infrastructure, while reports of problems on Downdetector, which tracks digital outages, had begun to decline by 09:00 GMT.

The tech giant also noted that it was "not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident".

But the company has reported having difficulties in fully restoring service, despite the fixes it has put in place.

"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," the company said Friday. "We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously."

The disruption went global within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, Downdetector reported.

A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Disruptions and financial losses from the outage could result in numerous insurance claims, but the overall hit to insurers is expected to be limited, said Mario De Cicco, vice president of European financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS.

De Cicco estimated global insured losses from the incident at between $300 million and $500 million, well below the $400 million to $1.5 billion financial toll from the 2024 CrowdStrike outage that crashed more than 8 million Windows-based computers and caused ‌widespread disruptions.

Global impact

Japan's economy, trade and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa said there was no doubt that the outage would cause a "significant impact".

"Since this software is used by a vast number of people, we will closely monitor the situation and take every possible measure to address it," Akazawa told Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) called for a national review of sovereign IT risk, with CEO Prins Ralston saying 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," Ralston said, according to ACS publication Information Age.

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.

"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company wrote on X.

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it added.

Thousands of users also reported issues with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector.

Microsoft also faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and in October last year. Last month, it reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

"The bigger worry is that this is not the first Microsoft 365 outage this year," said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro.

"If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider's hands."

Still, some analysts have questioned whether such incidents can push customers on to rivals due to the steep switching costs of replacing tools embedded so deeply in daily operations.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)