Microsoft 365 services for consumer and business users are still offline. Issues were initially reported yesterday evening around 6pm and originally, according to The Guardian, affected Outlook, Teams and Copilot, in the US before spreading across the Asia Pacific and beyond. Affected agencies include hospitals, schools and universities, public transport services and even secret service agencies.
OpenAI and Anthropic have also been affected.
The outage is not believed to be part of a cyber attack and has been attributed to settings applied to Microsoft 365 servers.
An update posted to Microsoft’s website read: “We’ve made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region. Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues.
“Our focus is now on extending these recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions, while continuing stabilisation efforts and adding supporting capacity to improve service consistency.
“Reducing e-mail queues and backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour e-mail timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.
“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defence-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.”
A present Copilot, OneDrive, Outlook.com and the free version of Microsoft teams are operational.
Commenting, Richard Ford, CTO of Integrity360, said: “Many organisations have put all their eggs in the Microsoft basket. Is it time to rethink that? Microsoft bundles may make financial sense, but businesses need to weigh that against the cost of business disruption and lost revenue when they are unable to communicate with customer and colleagues.
“It appears that the front end portal used to manage Microsoft security services and view alerts is also affected. While the security services are still working in the background, customers cannot manage their Microsoft security estate or view alerts through the portal. This is still a concern, particularly for organisations that rely on Microsoft for both their day-to-day operations and cyber security.
“Outages are something businesses have to live with but they should look to minimise their exposure to a single vendor where possible.”
Sovereignty as protection
Forrester principal analyst Dario Maisto added that a reliance on tools managed overseas bring with it concerns over consistency of protection: “[This] outage, for the little we know so far, represents the perfect quasi-natural experiment for stress testing an organisation’s – and even an entire continent – digital sovereignty posture.
He continued: “Although this outage does not strictly pose a sovereignty question, as this seems to be more an accident than the consequence of a government’s will, it does allow us to test what would happen if interruption of mailing services and AI tools like Copilot would be the direct consequence of a political act from the government.
“Sovereign communication tools abound in the market, but we need to be careful as the real problem is the communication protocol, not the communication tool itself. This is biggest hurdle for sovereign communication alternatives.”
Posters on social media have been fervent in their criticism of Microsoft and the braindrain caused by waves of lay-offs and reliance on AI have created at the company. On X the user Ilithor wrote: “As one of those laid off that actually still knows how these systems work, this has been the most entertaining shitshow to watch. Well deserved.”
Justin Randall summarised the mood well with his post: The “overpaid” legacy engineers that M$ [Microsoft] got rid of who were silently holding the world together turned out to be worth every penny huh?”
Update
Charles Lamanna, EVP, Copilot, agents and platform at Microsoft, issued an update on the recovery effort at 3pm: “We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure. 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. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”
Update
A statement issued by a Microsoft spokesperson at 5pm read: “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. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.
“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI/agents. 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.
“Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.”
Microsoft has promised to issue a post-incident report once a review has been completed.
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