Microsoft Says Making Progress Fixing One of Its Longest Outages
Microsoft Corp. said it was making progress in efforts to restore access to its flagship software and end an outage that has paralyzed government offices, traders and businesses globally.
The company said in an update posted at about 9 a.m. New York time that it was seeing improvements in service availability, “with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.” Still, the company warned that users of more than 20 products and services may continue to encounter errors.
That includes Outlook, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence tool, whose users experienced a second day of missed meeting invitations and unresponsive web pages on Friday. Previous disruptions have rarely lasted more than several hours.
The company provided near hourly updates of its efforts to fix its malfunctioning systems and route user traffic away from affected servers since the issues started Thursday afternoon, occasionally pointing to signs of recovery that proved fleeting. It was unclear what caused the outage, though the company described “a core process” on some servers becoming overwhelmed, causing them to stop responding entirely. Initial efforts to identify the problem and deploy a fix were stifled by further server errors.
Microsoft said it would provide more detail after the disruption was over, adding that there was no evidence of malicious activity.
The shares fell less than 1% as the markets opened in New York on Friday.
Companies relying on Microsoft systems, including Swiss luxury group Richemont and U.S.-based truck and bus manufacturer Workhorse Group Inc., had to postpone earnings releases this week. Richemont has since filed its report.
PVH Corp., the apparel conglomerate that owns the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, announced Thursday that it would cut about 4% of its global workforce. Some of the difficult conversations, scheduled to start in Asia on Friday morning, did not take place because of the outages, leaving employees uncertain of their future at the company, according to a person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to describe private matters. PVH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The outage shows the ubiquity of Microsoft’s email, chat and corporate software and is another example of the risks of relying on a small number of providers for critical technology. While most glitches are fixed quickly, faulty updates and server troubles at one key technology provider can ripple across the global economy. A 15-hour disruption at Amazon Web Services last year hit hundreds of websites. A faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. in 2024 grounded flights and crashed systems around the world, causing billions of dollars in damages.
“The technology market is concentrated among a few providers that deliver most of the services, and we take those services for granted,” said Stefano Mele, a Rome-based senior lawyer at Gianni & Origoni who specializes in cybersecurity. “That concentration of hardware, software and IT services can create a problem when there are no backup services supplied by other providers, based in different parts of the world and operating under different national flags.”
Users in more than 70 countries reported problems accessing Microsoft’s products, according to Downdetector, which recorded hundreds of thousands of complaints. Cybersecurity software, file-sharing services and administrator tools, were also disrupted. The company sells those products, along with workplace staples like Word and Excel, in a bundle under the M365 brand. The package has more than 450 million commercial users, the company said last month.
In the U.K., the National Health Service had to reschedule some procedures after the outage impacted communications, people familiar with the matter said. Guy’s and St. Thomas’ warned patients that email was offline, though the London hospital’s procedures were going ahead as planned. A number of local police forces also said they couldn’t take crime reports online, according to the Guardian newspaper.
Traders in Singapore, Indian brokerages and officials in Tokyo also reported issues with Microsoft services on Friday. Euronext sent a warning that its email communications were unavailable.
Japan’s finance ministry said in a statement that it had been unable to receive emails for most of the day. Without access to their email, government ministries resorted to pinning up paper notices to inform journalists about daily schedules.
Staffers at the Reserve Bank of Australia were also impacted, with Outlook down across departments at the bank, but critical operations ran normally. In New Zealand, immigration officials paused the processing of all visa applications.
Top photo: A signage of Microsoft is seen on March 13, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Jeenah Moon/Getty Images) Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Getty Images. Bloomberg.