IT disruptions: Microsoft sees “significant improvement” in the situation

The US technology company Microsoft has reported a significant improvement in the server problems that first occurred on Thursday.

On Platform X, the company wrote that it was “continuing to see improvements in service availability.” There are "more comprehensive improvements" in North America, "continued progress" in much of Europe and "encouraging signs of recovery" in the Asia-Pacific region.

Email queues have been significantly reduced. However, some users may still experience problems with access or delays in email delivery.

A massive global outage of Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams affected companies, authorities and other users around the world.

German federal authorities not affected

The Microsoft failure apparently did not affect the work of German federal authorities. “The federal administration is operational and essentially not affected by the failure,” said a spokesman for the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

According to the Digital Ministry, companies in the Federal Republic, on the other hand, were hit by the problems across the board. The BSI is “assuming that the German economy will be very badly affected,” said a spokesman for the ministry.

The ministry will learn further lessons from Microsoft's disruption, the spokesman said. "We see the importance of IT systems for the ability of companies to work, including administration. And that's why, in our view, there is a need for redundancies and alternatives that can be used in the event of a failure in order to continue working," he added.

The Bitkom and DIHK associations also called for more digital resilience.

Microsoft: Not an attack, but an internal problem

According to the company, the reason for the disruption was a previously carried out upgrade of the network capacity. The company said that a problem that was introduced only became apparent after recent network changes.

Hackers were apparently not behind the glitch, Microsoft had previously stated: "At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity in connection with this incident."

The Australian Interior and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said that the current series of breakdowns was apparently triggered by a faulty update, similar to the global IT breakdown by the security company CrowdStrike in 2024. Functions of Microsoft 365, which are based on the cloud-based email platform Exchange Online, were particularly affected.