Governments, businesses and public services in more than 70 countries were hit by a digital outage this week, as Microsoft tried to restore services following an outage that hit millions of users.
Institutions ranging from the Goldman Sachs bank to the German government and a county police department in Colorado (USA) said they were affected by the incident. The flaw prevented many users from sending or receiving emails via Microsoft Outlook and accessing other services.
US-based Microsoft quickly ruled out the possibility of a cyber attack as the cause of the problem, but had not yet fully restored access to services as of Friday afternoon (13), more than 24 hours after the outage was first reported.
The episode is the latest in a series of global information technology failures in recent years that have highlighted the dependence of much of the world economy on a small group of essential technology suppliers.
"This is one of the longest and most damaging outages ever recorded for Microsoft 365," said James Ferryman, professor of computer science at the University of Reading, referring to the company's suite of software and cloud services affected by the incident. "Issues were reported in more than 70 countries, and an outage that would normally be resolved within a few hours has now extended into a second day."
Microsoft services affected by the flaw also included cloud storage system OneDrive, artificial intelligence assistant Copilot and some cybersecurity tools.
The company has not yet provided a full account of what went wrong. So far, it has only reported that a large number of its servers were suddenly unavailable due to a technical problem, which caused an overload of internet traffic in other parts of its systems.
In a sign of the world's dependence on Microsoft for email services and other tools, the effects of the failure spread from Wall Street to the interior of the United States and other countries.
The German government said it expected a "very large impact" on the economy and said it was in contact with the technology company. In the United Kingdom, a Manchester judge held Microsoft co-founder and former chief executive Bill Gates responsible after the failure forced him to release jurors early. "I would apologize, but it's not my fault," said the magistrate. "It might be Mr. Gates' fault, but I don't think he's going to show up and apologize."
Goldman Sachs faced problems with its emails before finding a workaround, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Arapahoe County Sheriff's Department in Colorado asked that all bail payments be made in cash because the flaw affected its ability to process online transactions. In New Zealand, a city council had to suspend digital services, including dog registration.
"Microsoft's global outage is a stark reminder of how much we depend on a handful of big technology companies," said Rob Demain, chief executive of British cybersecurity firm e2e-assure. "The worldwide scope suggests that the cause is not regional and points to a software failure or an increase in network traffic rather than a localized problem."
In the United Kingdom, NHS England, England's public health service, reported that some staff were resorting to paper records, while pharmacies warned of delays in issuing prescriptions. The National Police Chiefs' Council said some police forces' online crime recording services had been affected. The email failure also affected schools and universities, while National Rail, the British railway operator, warned that passengers could have difficulty accessing digital tickets.
The outage is not the first to hit Microsoft customers in recent years. Users faced similar problems in July 2024, when a defect in a software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike affected devices using the Windows operating system, causing one of the biggest global information technology failures.
CrowdStrike pulled the faulty update within 78 minutes, but the issue affected at least 8.5 million devices. Although Microsoft said at the time that this represented less than 1% of all Windows computers, some customers took days to regain access to their systems. The episode caused the cancellation of around 10,000 flights around the world.
Last year, Amazon Web Services also suffered a large-scale outage, which reportedly affected thousands of businesses around the world and took more than 15 hours to fully resolve.
In an update released this Friday (13), Microsoft stated that it had identified the cause as a "technical problem" introduced during an "expansion of network capacity". The company said it had corrected the error and was restoring services "gradually". "Although this process took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration," he said.
Charles Lamanna, executive vice president at Microsoft, said: "We are seeing encouraging progress in recovery, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across an increasing portion of affected infrastructure."
Although Microsoft stated that the outage was not caused by a cyber attack, security authorities warned that digital criminals could try to take advantage of the situation.
"Scammers often exploit prominent news," said the United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Center, a body linked to GCHQ (British signals intelligence agency), in a public alert. "We encourage you to be alert to fraudulent calls and approaches from people pretending to be employees of Microsoft's technology support teams."
Demain of e2e-assure added that with the Microsoft Defender cybersecurity management platform also down, enterprise security teams had fewer resources to identify potentially malicious activity. "This is an ideal window for cybercriminals to act without being noticed," he said.
