Microsoft’s global outage and fixes: What we know

ByTech Word News

Microsoft is reporting major improvements to its services after Thursday’s global outage knocked it offline, disrupting communication and work in schools, government agencies and offices around the world. The Redmond, Wash.-based company said Friday it was seeing “encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of the affected infrastructure.”

“We remain focused on addressing the residual impact and ensuring reliable service restoration,” the company added.

Here’s what you should know as of Friday afternoon.

The outages began disrupting Microsoft tools and applications around noon Thursday, and quickly spread to more than 70 countries and regions, affecting millions of users. Down detectoroutage tracking website.

Some of Microsoft’s most popular products, including the email manager Outlook, the Teams app for messaging and video calling in the workplace, and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot have stopped working.

Microsoft said in a statement Friday that “at this time, we can confirm that there is no indication that this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.” He added that the issue was a “technical issue that did not involve cyber or AI” agents.

The company said there was no indication the outage was related to a Federal Aviation Administration ground stop issued late Friday afternoon affecting air travel across the country.

The company has yet to provide a clear answer, though it has promised to release a full report identifying the “root cause” of the outage.

On Thursday, Microsoft said a number of servers shut down unexpectedly, putting a strain on the remaining infrastructure. It said on Friday that the issue was introduced “during an earlier network capacity upgrade that occurred following a recent network change”. It said it had fixed the underlying issue and allowed its tools and applications to start working normally again.

“Due to the scale of demand, we restored services gradually and verified stability at each stage,” it was said. “Even though it took longer, it helped ensure a steady recovery.”

Luca Arnaboldi, an assistant professor of cybersecurity at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham in England, said the outage was a reminder that when people use the “cloud,” they are actually relying on servers that have limited resources.

“In this particular case, when the servers became unavailable, the capacity on the remaining servers increased, leaving fewer machines running,” he said in a statement. Even after some of the original servers came back online, he added, “Those that are currently under pressure are now failing, creating a constant catch-up.”

Parents had difficulty contacting their children’s schools, some government services were down and many office workers had no access to email.

The outage affected parts of the federal government, including the U.S. House of Representatives, according to Samantha Carter, a spokeswoman for the office that oversees the House of Representatives.

Elsewhere in the world, the British National Health Service he said the outage had a “disruptive impact”. Britain’s National Pharmaceutical Association said problems in the NHS made this difficult pharmacies communicate with doctors and some patients, which could cause delays in filling prescriptions. London’s Metropolitan Police said its online contact forms were not working.

In Australia, intelligence and police forces said their operations were affected. Singapore he said to taxpayers that the email was compromised, and Supreme Court of the Philippines and European Court of Human Rights he said the outage could cause delays in his work.

In many places, yes.

“City staff can send and receive email again,” said the city of Killeen, Texas declaration on Friday, a day after she told her employees that Outlook was down. The Louisiana attorney general’s office said Friday that “just getting our email up and running.”

The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado, which said the outage affected its ability to process bond payments for people being held in jail, said Friday the problem has been resolved.

On Friday morning, the US House announced “improvements to the functionality of Outlook” and said it would “continue to monitor the situation until all issues are resolved and full functionality of all Microsoft applications is restored.”

Of course, not everyone was happy that business was returning to normal. “Is it too late to go back to the emailless thing?” a lawyer in Toronto wrote on X.

Reporting by Isabella Kwai, Karla Adam and Adeel Hassan.