A Massive Microsoft 365 Outage Is Entering Its Second Day Worldwide
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It’s been a pretty big week in tech. First, Nvidia’s CEO resigns over what appears to be an ever-increasing number of scandalous affairs — including one with a Chinese spy — and then the behemoth known as Microsoft experiences one of its biggest outages in history.
Those who don’t live anywhere near the Microsoft 365 ecosystem have likely been blissfully oblivious, but services like Outlook, Teams, and Copilot have been down since yesterday, starting around 1 p.m. Eastern Time, based on reports collected by the Associated Press.
While even the biggest tech giants sometimes encounter occasional glitches, outages like this that bleed into a second day are quite rare, especially in this day and age. Microsoft was initially slow to comment on what caused the outage, though it quickly ruled out a cyberattack, telling The New York Times that it had seen “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.”
Many folks woke up this morning to find their Outlook inboxes still devoid of new mail, but the good news is that Microsoft’s services appear to be on the road to recovery. In a statement to The Verge, Charles Lamanna, the company’s Copilot, agents, and platform leader, said things are starting to improve.
We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure. We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.
Charles Lamanna
What’s most concerning about an outage of this nature is that it doesn’t just affect users checking their personal emails from their family. Many large organizations rely on Microsoft 365 to get their work done, leaving many forced to adapt or even send their employees home.
The impact is being felt across nearly every industry. After all, Microsoft 365 boasts over 450 million paid subscriptions. The New York Times notes just a few of the most serious, including Britain’s National Health Service, which said the outage was having a “disruptive impact” on its services, Australia’s intelligence and police forces, and even the Supreme Court of the Philippines and the European Court of Human Rights.
Marten AttaAlla, a cardiothoracic surgeon pausing for lunch near St Bartholomew’s Hospital in central London, said the outage had complicated efforts to staff an intensive care unit after somebody had called in sick.
The New York Times
What Went Wrong?
For most of the outage, Microsoft officials remained tight-lipped about specifics, preferring to focus on fixing the issue before releasing more details. Early on, Verge senior correspondent Tom Warren reported that the outage was “linked to Azure VNet config changes,” according to his sources.
Meanwhile, Sky News tech correspondent Rowland Manthorpe received a statement from Microsoft describing it purely as a “technical” issue and not a cyberattack.
As with many outages of this nature, Microsoft’s services will likely take a while to return for everyone. In a status update posted shortly after 11 a.m. ET, the company reiterated that this is not a result of malicious activity:
At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.
Another status update a few minutes ago (at 12:57 p.m. ET) now says, “We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services,” while noting that it’s been restoring services “gradually, validating stability at each stage” to “ensure a stable restoration.” The company also provided a bit more background info:
The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.
Microsoft is posting updates to its status page about every two hours, with the next update scheduled to come at 3 p.m. ET, so you can keep an eye on that if you’re still having connectivity problems, but beyond that there isn’t much more to do than hurry up and wait for the issues to be fully resolved.
