Microsoft's large-scale outage persists, affecting more than 70 countries, resulting in email outage

[London, Singapore, Silicon Valley Current Affairs] A large-scale failure that occurred in Microsoft's (MS) business software suite ``Microsoft 365'' is taking time to recover, and the impact spread to Asian countries and Europe on the 13th. The number of failure reports increased rapidly after the occurrence. Businesses and government agencies have been affected in more than 70 countries.

Microsoft announced on the 12th that a large-scale failure has occurred in its business software suite Microsoft 365. Email software such as Outlook was affected, causing problems such as the inability to send and receive emails in countries around the world. Many services were also affected, including the business chat software ``Teams'' and the artificial intelligence (AI) function ``CoPilot.''

According to the system failure information site Down Detector, the number of reports of failures increased rapidly from around noon on the 12th, Western time (early morning on the 13th, Japan time), and by morning European time (evening time, Japan time), the impact had spread to more than 36,000 services in more than 70 countries.

A spokesperson for Microsoft Japan commented on the 13th regarding the large-scale outage, saying, ``No facts suggesting a cyber attack have been confirmed.'' He said he would post detailed information on the recovery status on X (formerly Twitter), adding, ``Right now, we are putting all our efforts into recovery.''

In Singapore, many government agencies use Outlook, and for internal communication, they were forced to use the same mobile phone for business chat. According to the Government Technology Agency, although there may be a delay in responding to inquiries by email, there is no disruption to urgent or important operations. The country's major bank, UOB, urged customers to contact them directly by phone rather than email for urgent matters.

The Metropolitan Police said that submissions from some online forms may be affected, and has provided a telephone number on its website to make a report.