The world is being hit by one of its biggest ever outages. Here’s how it happened - The Independent
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Microsoft has been hit by a huge outage, taking down Outlook and Teams – causing chaos across the world.
The issues began on Thursday afternoon and have continued into Friday. Because so many organisations rely on Microsoft’s tools, it has already caused problems everywhere from hospitals to airports.
Microsoft said the problems were affecting its 365 Services, which include the messaging app Teams, email service Outlook and its Copilot AI tool. More than 430 million people use those services, according to Microsoft’s website, including many of the world’s biggest companies and most important organisations.
:: Follow our live coverage of the outage here.
Amid the disruption, many speculated that the problems could be the result of a cyber attack. That gained particular prominence because of widespread fears that the growing power of artificial intelligence tools could bring disruptive outages of this kind.
But experts and Microsoft itself both say that there is no evidence the technical issues are the result of a cyber attack. Instead, it seems to be a more innocent, if equally concerning, mistake.
Microsoft said the outage came because of “elevated load”, not because of an increased amount of traffic but because its servers had become “unexpectedly unavailable”. It has not said exactly why those servers became unavailable – previous similar problems have been caused by everything from physical incidents such as fires at data centres to errant updates that take the systems online, which appears most likely in this case.
The company said it had no evidence of “malicious activity” and executive vice president Charles Lamanna said Microsoft had ruled out a cyber attack. Experts agreed that it appeared to be the result of a “bug” – though the exact details of it remain unclear.
“Rather than a cyber attack, most likely this was caused by an update to software which contained a bug,” said Tom Worthington, from the Australian National University.
“It is unlikely there will be a loss of data, just inconvenience as systems are manually rolled back to the last good copy of the software. This is a useful reminder not to be dependent on one mobile phone company or email service.”
Despite the fact that there was no evidence of a hack, security experts warned that it could nonetheless be used by cyber criminals to launch attacks of their own.
“Although the Microsoft outage is not a cybersecurity issue, bad actors will be looking to take advantage of concerned individuals, offering a resolution or assurances,” said Aiden Sinnott, principal threat researcher at Sophos Counter Threat Unit.
“At this time, even more so than usual, people should exercise caution when receiving emails, texts or calls purporting to be from Microsoft or other affected businesses, particularly banks or shops. Be aware of requests for urgent action, sharing of personal information, and avoid clicking on links sent via message or email.”
Experts also warned that it was yet another reminder that organisations need to work harder on both resilience, to ensure that issues of this nature are less likely, and redundancy to ensure that they could continue even when they do happen.
“With so much of the world's tech landscape reliant on a handful of giants, when one fails it can quickly evolve into a global IT blackout. Services from email to AI virtual assistants connected to Microsoft can stall for users, grinding many organisations to a halt,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET.
“This kind of outage is exactly why services haven’t become fully digital. For now, affected users who need to contact someone should rely on alternate forms of communication like phone calls. For big tech firms, this is yet another lesson on the importance of cyber resilience and having fallback plans in place for when critical servers fail.”
