The fall of Microsoft affects productivity in Spain, but not essential services: “The impact is being minor”

After more than 15 hours with Microsoft services down around the world, incidents in different economic sectors are beginning to be noticed, from Japanese banks to Australian courts, in the more than 70 countries from which users have reported problems. In Spain, for the moment, the Administration has not notified that the fall of Microsoft has had a special impact on the operation of public services. According to sources from the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Public Service, “the impact is being minor” because the majority of emails from AGE employees are hosted in the Administration's own centers. Teams is being affected, as is the AI ​​chatbot Copilot, which is hosted in the cloud, but the forecast, these same sources add, is that the systems can be restored in the next few hours.

This global drop in Microsoft services is also having, for now, a minimal impact on the public health network, according to the most populated autonomous communities that have responded so far to the questions posed by EL PAÍS. “In terms of healthcare, the impact has been zero, there has only been a small incident at an administrative level in some center,” explains a spokesperson for the Community of Madrid.

The Generalitat of Catalonia has expressed itself in similar terms. “At the moment we have no notable incidents,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Health. “The impact is very small and in no case is it affecting healthcare activity,” explains the Xunta de Galicia. A spokesperson for the Valencian Community, for its part, assures that the fall "has not had a healthcare impact for patients and has only hindered administrative tasks for which affected tools such as email and Teams are used."

The failures in Teams, Outlook and Copilot have put transport companies on guard to guarantee contact with travelers and manage reservations, a section in which email is an essential tool that can be complemented or replaced by SMS mobile messages and calls from customer service centers. Sources from Iberia and Ryanair, two of the leading airlines by traffic in Spain, claim to have not been affected by the Microsoft crisis in the planned flight programs

Activity in the Spanish airport network has not suffered either, despite the fact that the infrastructure manager, Aena, has lost email in its central services and has replaced that channel with other systems. "At the moment, only productivity applications are affected, such as email, which is replaced by others such as Teams, WhatsApp or the telephone. There are no operational applications affected," says an Aena spokesperson.

Renfe, for its part, does not use Microsoft technology for the operation of its trains, so the rail service is not affected this Friday beyond the communications from the company's central offices with the outside world, which requires the use of other technologies other than Teams or Outlook email.