Early lunch, more chatter: Microsoft outage brings workers to a standstill

A major global Microsoft outage has caused problems with various services, including emails and AI products. Microsoft has stated the issue is not due to a cybersecurity attack, but efforts to resolve the problem have been unsuccessful so far. The services impacted include Microsoft 365 apps like Teams, Outlook, and Copilot, which have experienced "connectivity problems".

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps worldwide, and the true extent of the outage is yet to be determined. Downdetector reported 140,000 issues from 74 countries on Thursday evening, though this figure is likely lower than the actual number of affected users. Microsoft 365 is also utilized by companies around the globe, potentially causing downstream effects on other services.

Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic have reported issues as well. The outage has resulted in widespread disruption, affecting city governments, police forces, schools, and healthcare networks across the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, and the UK. Microsoft has ruled out a cyber-attack and attributed the ongoing outage to "elevated load" on its infrastructure, meaning servers were handling a much higher volume of traffic than usual.

This led to some servers becoming "unexpectedly unavailable," causing added traffic to remain on the remaining servers, straining them. Microsoft reported encouraging recovery progress in Europe and North America, but warned that some users may still encounter intermittent issues as recovery actions continue. The root cause of the delay in fixing the issue is believed to be the failure of a component responsible for establishing secure connections, which caused a snowball effect, with one server failure leading to others becoming unavailable as well.