[Editor’s Note: Follow Khaleej Times’ live blog as we report on the Microsoft outage affecting Outlook and other services globally]
Microsoft on Friday apologised for the massive outage that hit users, public services and businesses around the world, saying the collapse was “a technical issue not related to cyber or AI.”
“The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions,” the tech giant said.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously,” it said, adding full operations were still being restored after the outage started on Thursday. “We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete,” it added.
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The outage, which hit several Microsoft products, 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.”
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.
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.
Source: Khaleej Times