Microsoft working ‘urgently’ to fix outages
Microsoft says its efforts to fix the issue – not believed due to a cyberattack – have not worked as expected.
United States technology company Microsoft has said it is working with “urgency” to try to fix outages that have disrupted many of its services.
Microsoft reported on Friday that it has achieved the “partial recovery” of services in certain regions, but its measures have not ensured sustained recovery.
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The company said it was reviewing “additional actions” to “improve overall infrastructure stability,” after attributing the issues to “elevated load” on its infrastructure.
“We appreciate your organisation’s patience and understanding while we work with urgency to resolve this incident,” Microsoft added.
Reports of problems with Outlook, the company’s email client, climbed to about 130,000 on the outage tracking site Downdetector shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (18:00 GMT) on Thursday.
Users also reported having trouble accessing Microsoft’s workplace messaging app Teams and AI assistant Copilot, along with other Microsoft 365 services. The company said the issues could affect users in any region.
Microsoft said on social media that servers were unavailable and failing automatic health checks, putting pressure on those still operating.
It said it was testing a configuration change to redistribute traffic that was elevated on parts of its infrastructure and restarting affected services to bring them back online.
“We’re working to safely return them to service,” the company said.
However, by Friday, the US company reported that its recovery efforts were not going as well as expected, and problems were reported in Asia and Australia on Friday morning.
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 news 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.
Reporting from London, Global News Insight correspondent Sonia Gallego noted the disruption has had a significant impact, exposing how heavily services and businesses depend on Microsoft.
“You have entire [doctor] surgeries who have to go on phones to speak to patients and people in need of urgent medical attention,” Gallego said.
“This highlights how much reliance there is on a few tech companies for most of our systems.”
