Microsoft reported progress in fixing a major outage that knocked out email and other services across 74 countries on Friday, affecting hospitals, airlines and businesses worldwide.
The technology giant said it saw “broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia-Pacific” after the disruption hit several of its products.
What went wrong
Microsoft blamed the problem on “elevated load” on its infrastructure but said it found no signs of malicious activity causing the incident. The company struggled to fully restore service despite rolling out fixes.
The outage spread globally within an hour, knocking out Microsoft 365 products including Outlook email, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant. Downdetector, which tracks digital outages, showed disruptions across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Health care and business hit hard
Britain’s National Health Service faced serious disruption, according to Rachel Harrison, who heads public services at the GMB union. She said NHS 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.”
In London’s financial district, workers told AFP they rely heavily on Microsoft’s tools. Yashmit Sharma (26), an auditor, said: “I think one of the biggest things is Copilot not working, and you can sort of see the dependency now on Copilot. I think this was the main bummer. And Outlook as well, of course.”
Sheera (40), a risk manager at a mid-sized bank, said businesses need better preparation. “I think we need to be a little bit more careful. Anything can happen: you wake up and Outlook is not working and it’s the main communication we use for our global team.”
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Countries scramble to respond
Airlines in India warned customers their email queries may not get through. IndiGo and Akasa Air both posted on X that their email support services stopped working.
New Zealand paused all visa application processing until further notice. Japan’s economy, trade and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper the outage would cause “significant impact” because so many people use the software.
The Australian Computer Society called for a national review of IT risk. Chief executive Prins Ralston said small businesses may not have backup options when Outlook fails. “We need to know the systems that keep this country running won’t simply fall over without notice,” Ralston said.
Reports of problems on Downdetector began dropping by 0900 GMT as Microsoft continued working to restore full service.
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