Tech and AI
Microsoft says a patch is working as its global Outlook and Teams outage passes 12 hours, and rules out a cyber-attack
- What happened
- Microsoft said on Friday it was seeing positive results from a patch, after an outage of Outlook, Teams and other 365 services lasted more than 12 hours.
- Why it matters
- The outage hit users in 74 countries, including governments; Microsoft says it found no sign of a cyber-attack or other malicious activity.
- What’s next
- Microsoft is extending the fix to more servers and has promised a post-incident report on the root cause.
How this story developed
- 22:03First report
- +2
- 02:243rd source
- 06:444th source
- 11:165th source
- 11:16Updated
- 22:03First reportTechCrunch
- 23:012nd sourceWired
- 23:01ConfirmedWas: Single source
- 02:243rd sourceThe Verge
- 06:444th sourceFrance 24
- 11:165th sourceThe Guardian World
- 11:16LatestUpdatedMicrosoft says a patch is showing positive results and that it has found no sign of a cyber-attack.
Full story
Signs of recovery
Microsoft said on Friday that it was “seeing positive results” from its efforts to end an outage that has cut users around the world off from Outlook email, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services for more than 12 hours, the Guardian reported. In an update shortly after 7am GMT, the company said it had applied a patch to an upstream authentication and routing configuration component on part of its infrastructure, and was working to extend it to more servers.
The problems started on Thursday afternoon US time. On Thursday evening Microsoft said that its first changes were “not taking as expected” and that it was looking for other ways to add capacity, France 24 reported. The Guardian said the disruption was patchy on Friday, with some but not all users reporting problems.
Not a cyber-attack
Microsoft said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the incident, France 24 reported. The company has said that a large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, and the Guardian reported that they failed during automated checks and that restarted servers could become unresponsive again once traffic returned.
“Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defense-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report.”
Microsoft, The Guardian World
Mark Gregory, an associate professor at RMIT University, told the Guardian the outage appeared to affect the network layer. When some servers fail, users crowd onto the rest of the pool, overload them and bring them down too, he said, describing a cascading problem.
Who was hit
At the peak, the outage tracker Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 reports from 74 countries and territories, covering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and the Copilot assistant. New Zealand’s foreign ministry said the outage affected its ability to receive email at all of its embassies and consulates, France 24 reported.
The outage also broke Microsoft 365 connectors used by AI services, among them OpenAI’s, the Guardian reported. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice-president for Copilot, said the company regretted the disruption.
“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue.”
Charles Lamanna, The Guardian World