Redmond. A major disruption that lasted for hours cut off companies and consumers worldwide from central cloud offerings from the software company Microsoft. Not only the Outlook email service was affected, but also services from the Microsoft 365 cloud package in general. With the Office communications service Teams, for example, scheduling meetings and calendar connections did not work properly. In addition, the AI assistant Copilot and interfaces to third-party providers were temporarily disrupted, including AI services such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Microsoft was making gradual progress restoring systems by Friday afternoon. Measures have already been completed for parts of the affected infrastructure and data traffic has gradually resumed, as the software company announced on Platform X. There have been improvements in key areas - such as access to mailboxes and processing emails.
However, there may still be occasional short-term disruptions. The focus is now on continuing to stabilize and increasing capacity to ensure consistently reliable performance.
The message corresponds to the experience of users of the programs. The Teams service was initially largely usable again, and in the early afternoon (CET) significant improvements were observed in the Outlook email service.
Deutsche Bahn reported hardly any problems due to the disruption. “Trains run independently of Microsoft systems, which is why nationwide rail operations are stable,” said a spokesman for the federally owned company. In very few cases there were delays “because short-term timetable adjustments could not be sent by email”.
According to a spokesman, there was no impact on air traffic at Lufthansa. Other systems are in use. The airports in Frankfurt and Berlin also announced that the Microsoft problems did not affect flight operations.
According to Germany's largest electricity distribution network operator Eon, the operation of the energy networks was not affected. The reason for this is a clear separation between systems for information and operational technology, explained a spokeswoman. The latter run on specially secured infrastructures that are not dependent on the affected Microsoft services.
In the Frankfurt financial district, as in many places, internal communication was disrupted. Bank functions were not affected and all ran without any disruptions, said a Commerzbank spokesman. At Deutsche Börse it was said that securities trading was running as usual.
According to the federal government, the hour-long disruption had no major impact on the administration. “We have no reports of major outages from the federal administration,” said a spokesman for the Digital Ministry in Berlin. However, it is assumed that the German economy will be greatly affected.
The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) said that many companies had received reports of communication failures. However, there is no evidence of a cyber attack. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said there was no knowledge yet that the ministry or related authorities were affected.
The spokesman for the Digital Ministry explained that the federal client was running stably as a standard IT workstation in the federal administration. This does not use Microsoft in the cloud, but is operated on its own infrastructure. However, not all authorities are yet using the federal client, but it should become standard across the entire administration by 2032. The uniform email client in the federal administration is running stable.
According to Microsoft engineers, a process on the affected servers that is responsible for establishing secure connections was overloaded - as a result of which the computers no longer processed requests. The company also reversed the most recent configuration change, which coincided with the start of the disruption.
Microsoft said it is looking for ways to increase capacity given persistent imbalances in data traffic control. It remained unclear when all Microsoft 365 services would run without restrictions again.
Outages of online services are part of everyday life - but they are usually short-lived. Sometimes the problems are so serious that disruptions last for hours. Microsoft's cloud and email services experienced a widespread, hours-long outage at the end of August that left users unable to log in or send and receive messages.
In Australia, the failure occurred in the middle of the final exams. Melbourne students told the ABC they were unable to prepare for pending language exams because they were unable to access materials or the exam authority's website. Online lessons at vocational schools via Microsoft Teams were also affected. Doctor’s appointments and examinations had to be postponed.
The outage led to delays in air traffic. In Sydney, a plane bound for Papua New Guinea had to wait on the ground because the captain had not received the documents required for takeoff via Outlook.
