- Microsoft services are currently down worldwide, with users reporting major outages of its services
- Businesses, schools, and government agencies are impacted with some financial losses predicted
- There’s currently no timeline as to when services will resume, but Microsoft is seeing some early stabilization, it has said
Microsoft services are currently down globally, supposedly due to a technical problem with the company’s server infrastructure.
Businesses, schools, police forces, and government agencies, are being hit significantly, with some estimating signifcant losses as a result.
While Microsoft has said it’s seeing some stabilization, there is no timeline as to when its services will be fully accessible again to users.
Microsoft is Suffering a Major Outage, But What Caused It?
On Thursday afternoon, North American Microsoft users started reporting disruptions to applications such as Outlook and Teams. Within an hour, reports erupted, and since then, 74 countries have been impacted by what is now a major outage of Microsoft services.
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According to several outlets, the outage was caused by a technical problem with Microsoft’s server infrastructure. Although, experts have noted that the incident is taking a lot longer to resolve than would be expected, considering Microsoft’s stature and engineering expertise.
The company has said the issue wasn’t caused by any kind of cybersecurity breach. Users across the world, however, are saying scammers are taking advantage of the outage and pretending to be from Microsoft.
What is Impacted by the Microsoft Outage?
Around 430 million people use Microsoft 365 services around the world, so the impact of this outage is major. Services such as Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft’s AI software Copilot are all suffering, leading to major disruption.
Businesses, schools, government agencies and healthcare services worldwide, such as the UK’s National Health Service, have reported issues. Complaints are coming in from all sides of the world, from workers at their desks to government ministers.
The Japanese economy, trade, and industry minister has said the outage has had a “major impact.” Similarly, Australia’s spy agency and federal policy have reported disruptions tied with billions of dollars of predicted damage.
The widespread impact points to the dangers of institutions and businesses worldwide relying on a single provider, especially for many of their major operational needs.
When Will Microsoft Services Be Back Online?
In a recent update, Microsoft said it was seeing “early stabilization and capacity improvements,” however there is currently no timeline as to when services will be up and back to normal.
“Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. Engineering teams are cycling affected infrastrucre through traffic drain, restart, remediation, and staged return-to-service while monitoring closely,” the company said.
In the meantime, the company has extended its email timeout window to 48 hours, to help protect delayed messages that have been sent out, but not received yet.
This isn’t the first outage Microsoft has experienced this year. In August, users had issues logging in and connecting to its services, and it took a few days for systems to fully recover. While the cause of this outage was supposedly the rollout of a code update, we could see a similar timeline for this outage.
