Microsoft Outage cripples millions globally

The major global outage that has caused problems - or in some cases disabled entire services for Microsoft users - has been felt in over 70 countries. The company's 365 admin centers which include: e-mails, Outlook, Copilot - the company's AI software - and teams meetings, have been affected by “connectivity problems”.

It is believed that more than 430 million people use the Microsoft 365 apps worldwide and it is expected to have a knock-on effect to multiple other services. Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic have both reported problems as a result of the outage. International Public & Private businesses, Government departments, courts and hospitals amongst others, are all affected and many airlines have been reporting significant delays as a result of the outage.

Banks, universities and other institutions across the world are warning users to beware of fake offers of “IT support” as fraudsters often capitalise on situations like these. Microsoft do not believe the outage to be a malicious cyber attack, with no suspected hacking involvement, but say it is more of an internal issue of “jammed servers”. They are insisting that there will be no “compromising effect”. The company are attributing the disruption to “elevated overload” on its infrastructure.

Global cybersecurity advisor Jake Moore from internet security company ESET called the scale of this outage “absolutely massive” and further commented: “this is such a data hungry world that we're living in, we need more space to accommodate the amount that we are using”. He added: “We are incredibly dependent on these particular (tech) giants, so we should make sure we have backups in place for when things go wrong. This 'elevated load' that they talk about is just one of those examples that we're going to see more and more in the future.”

Another expert has said that this points to “incredible incompetence” which could potentially cost millions in economic impact. Paul Spain from New Zealand-based advisory firm Gorilla Technology pointed out that with e-mails and services offline, companies have practically “lost a whole business day”.

Monitoring website Downdetector reported that the Microsoft outage reached 74 countries in around just one hour, essentially indicating that its servers were handling more work than they can usually manage and consequently straining the entire infrastructure, resulting in it “becoming overwhelmed” and leading to this massive disruption.