Disruption as Microsoft battles to fix global outage

Microsoft users are continuing to experience disruption as the tech giant worked to resolve outages impacting some of its most popular services.

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in Ireland and the UK at around 6.15pm yesterday.

Microsoft said that it was not aware of any "malicious activity" behind the hours-long disruption of its Outlook services.

"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution," Microsoft said.

The impact of the outage has been felt globally, with users ranging from companies to governments reporting that they were unable to communicate via Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories were hit, outage tracker Downdetector reported. A map posted by Downdetector showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas," but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected "Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region."

Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.

"We appreciate your organisation's patience and understanding while we work with urgency to resolve this incident," the company said.

Affected products included instant messaging service Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of its Cloud services, among others.

In an update, the tech giant said that although it had managed to get servers operating multiple times overnight, those servers had crashed.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported issues.

"We’re investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected," OpenAI said in a statement on its website.

"We’ll share an update when we know more."

Microsoft said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.

"We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected," the company said.

The tech firm provided regular updates on official Microsoft 365 accounts.

It had earlier directed people to a page on its website for updates, but users complained the page did not load.

A cybersecurity expert said the indications from Microsoft is the problem is related to what it calls "an elevated load", where a significant number of servers supporting services are unavailable, and the ones that are are struggling to cope with the user load.

Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Waystone Digital Assurance Managing Director Conor Flynn said services are working intermittently for some users.

"And that's the most frustrating thing for people is that they won't know until they try to send or expect to receive a message whether it's working or not," he said.

Mr Flynn said he expects that there will be significant progress to restore services.

"The good news is that Microsoft have made strong statements that this isn't a cybersecurity incident, that it looks like it's an engineering issue.

"And with their resources and the impact it's having, we would expect that there will be recovery quite soon."