Microsoft Outage Drags On, Disrupting Outlook and Teams for Global Businesses
Global Impact and Ongoing Challenges of Microsoft Service Outage
Nov 12 (Reuters) - Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams were disrupted for about 10 hours on Thursday as the tech giant struggled to fix issues with some servers, hitting businesses and government agencies globally that use the popular platforms.
Microsoft's Response and Technical Difficulties
In its latest update, Microsoft said efforts to improve serviceability were not progressing as expected.
"We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," it said.
Outage Reports and Affected Regions
Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed more than 25,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at 9:30 p.m. ET (0230 GMT). It also showed outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, early Friday local time.
At its peak, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US around 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.
Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online Functionality
In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 services that depended on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional. Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.
Impact on Email Systems and Security Concerns
Australian Government Response
IMPACT ON EMAIL SYSTEMS
Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack.
"They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke said at a press conference.
"The impact that they are dealing with ... is very much on email systems," the minister added.
Australia's spy agency and federal police were among organisations caught up in the outage on Friday.
Comparison to Previous Major Outages
The CrowdStrike malfunction of 2024 was one of the largest internet disruptions, hobbling technology systems in hospitals, banks, and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.
US Government and Microsoft’s Mitigation Efforts
The US House of Representatives said the outage impacted its users and its engineers were working with Microsoft.
The company had earlier in the day pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable and said it was not driven by an increase in traffic.
Microsoft had then said the restored servers remained stable so far and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online.
"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," Microsoft said in a previous statement.
At 6 p.m. ET (2300 GMT), Microsoft had said it observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected.
Businesses Feel the Impact
Third-Party Services and Industry Reactions
BUSINESSES FEEL THE IMPACT
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.
Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Previous Outages and Ongoing Disruptions
Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted the tech giant's suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.
Company-Specific Impacts
Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on November 12, rescheduled it to November 16 citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese, Anzar Mehraj, Katha Kalia, Preetika Parashuraman, Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru and Stefica Bikesh in Sydney; Additional reporting by Jeffrey Dastin; ; Editing by Leroy Leo and Stephen Coates)
