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Some Microsoft (MS) services experienced a ``connection failure'' on the 12th, and recovery efforts are continuing. As a result, services used by many companies such as the chat tool ``Teams'', the email service ``Outlook'', and the AI chatbot ``Copilot'' are no longer available around the world.
According to Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages,
Reports of problems with MS services increased rapidly on the 12th. By 6pm GMT that day (3am Japan time on the 13th), approximately 140,000 people had reported problems with Outlook. This is more than 2,000 times more than a normal problem report.
MS did not say how many users were affected by the outage. The company has approximately 430 million users worldwide.
So far, institutions in at least 74 countries have reported the effects of the outage, including government systems in Singapore and Japan, Australian intelligence agencies, and the Philippine Supreme Court.
Downdetector says it's seeing an increase in reports of outages from European countries, where it's time for people to wake up and get active.
Because MS's infrastructure is used by other technology companies, AI development companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have also been reporting problems with their tools.
MS initially said that recovery efforts to resume service were showing "good results." However, it later reported that the fix was not progressing "as expected."
In an update just before 5:00 p.m. Japan time, the company said it was seeing "good results" in terms of service stability and capacity expansion. "We are now implementing these measures more broadly across the affected regions."
MS explained that the cause of the failure was that the servers were under a higher than normal load. In this case, some servers became "unexpectedly unavailable," which caused other servers to become overloaded.
Charles Ramana, executive vice president of the company, said the outage was not a cybersecurity incident. However, one expert the BBC spoke to said the outage appeared to be the result of "incredible incompetence".
Nikki Chiu of cybersecurity firm Mimecast said the MS outage highlighted the risks of relying on a single technology provider for critical operations. He said that if an IT problem were to occur, operations could come to a complete halt.
Mimecast also uses MS tools, but they have been able to continue their work because they have an alternative platform in place.
"Companies should reconsider these dependencies, put alternatives in place, and develop clear contingency plans to ensure critical operations can continue in the event of an outage," Chu said.
(English article Microsoft scrambles to solve global outage affecting Outlook and Teams but says fixes not going 'as expected')
