Microsoft outage explained: what went wrong and is your data at risk?
Governments, doctor surgeries and even rival AI firms have been caught up, and the episode is sharpening questions about Europe's reliance on a handful of US tech giants.
Microsoft experienced a widespread outage on Thursday, impacting Outlook email, Teams, and other workplace tools for over 24 hours. The disruption affected 74 countries and territories, with nearly 140,000 reported issues on Outlook alone. Microsoft hasn't identified a root cause, but it ruled out a cyberattack and noted that its fixes initially failed.
Services like SharePoint Online, Defender XDR, Planner, and To Do also experienced issues. The outage disrupted healthcare, government, tech firms, and businesses, leading to patients being advised to call instead of using email for urgent matters and earnings calls being postponed. Microsoft blamed server overload at first, then acknowledged unexpected server unavailability, which the company was testing a configuration change to address.
Despite the lack of evidence for hacking, rumors of cyber attacks spread due to Microsoft's lack of confirmed cause or timeline. While this is primarily an access issue, there are indirect risks such as weaker security defenses, potential for scams, and delayed messages. This outage is not a one-off, with similar issues happening in January and August.
It also highlights concerns about reliance on US cloud providers. Microsoft has promised updates through its service status page, but the root cause and prevention methods remain unclear.
Written by urgent.news from Euronews's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
