LIVE - Global outage of Microsoft and Outlook: difficulties continue, serious consequences reported around the world

The global outage affecting certain Microsoft services has “serious repercussions” on British health services, Rachel Harrison, head of public services at the GMB union, said on Friday, stressing however that “emergency interventions” seemed “spared”.

“Staff on the 111 (medical advice and guidance) and 999 (emergency calls) telephone services cannot transmit patient information as they usually do, leading to a considerable backlog of work and risking chaos,” she explained in a statement.

For the moment, the company remains cautious about the causes of the outage, simply pointing out that it was caused by a “high load” on the infrastructure.

The firm, however, ruled out the hypothesis of a cyberattack: “At this stage, we are not aware of any malicious activity causing this incident,” Microsoft said this Friday. “At this stage, I can confirm that there are no signs of malicious action or cyberattack,” said Charles Lamanna, one of the company’s executive vice presidents.

Sensitive since Thursday evening, November 12, the computer failure affects several tools of the American giant Microsoft. This concerns in particular the Microsoft 365 Cloud environment, popular with businesses, Outlook messaging, which is part of it, or the Teams messaging application, again widely deployed in firms.

This summer, Microsoft reported that its Microsoft 365 services had 450 million users worldwide. Consequences are therefore felt in many countries. In New Zealand, the government warned that messaging at embassies and consulates was disrupted, and the immigration services announced the suspension of new visa applications, being unable to process those already submitted. Same problem in Japan, where the government admitted that its information systems were affected.