Microsoft reported this Friday around two in the afternoon, Spanish peninsular time, that it was already recovering from the global drop in its services that began on Thursday afternoon and that has affected millions of users in at least 70 countries. From that moment on, the situation has improved as the hours have passed. “We are seeing continued progress in the recovery in the affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements in much of Europe and encouraging signs of recovery in Asia Pacific,” read a company statement. The executive vice president of Copilot at Microsoft, Charles Lamanna, has ruled out that the incident was caused by a cyber attack, as the company tries to regain normality in its operations.
In a message on social network restoring service to remaining customers and regions.”
The affected products are Outlook email, the Teams environment, SharePoint Online, the Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, the OneDrive and OneNote cloud services and the Microsoft 365 package, which includes applications such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint. These are programs very present in corporate environments, which channel large workflows in offices in both the private and public sectors.
“For now, I can confirm that there are no indications that this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Lamanna, who holds the position of vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platforms at Microsoft, considered the largest software company in the world, wrote in X. The company has assured this afternoon that, although email queues have been “significantly reduced, approaching normal levels”, while the recovery of the systems continues, “some users may experience intermittent access problems or delays in the delivery of emails.” “We know that our customers depend on our services to get important work done every day, and we regret the impact these outages have had on those who depend on us,” they added later.
According to the company, the problem is not due to an unexpected increase in traffic due to increased user activity, but rather because several servers had become unavailable without being expected and their work fell on those that remained, in a domino effect that ended up saturating the systems. There is still no definitive analysis of why this happened, but the only thing that seems clear is that the problem affects services "that interact with Exchange Online and email." That is why it dragged Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, associated with email, while those that do not depend on Exchange continue to work.
"What we know for now is that yesterday there was an abnormal increase in network traffic that, a priori, seems to indicate a technical failure most likely linked to BGP and DNS management [online traffic routing protocols and domain name system]. There is no evidence of any attack," explains David Arroyo Guardeño, head scientist of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection Research Group (GICP) of the CSIC. "The implications of this fall are enormous in a large majority of industrial sectors. Microsoft Outlook and, increasingly, Copilot, are very present in a very large percentage of our services and digital infrastructure," he adds.
User complaints on the specialized Downdetector platform reached a first peak after seven in the afternoon on Thursday, Spanish peninsular time, and problems were reported in more than 70 countries. This morning, around seven o'clock, a second wave of incidents began, which doubled in volume that recorded on Thursday afternoon. After five in the afternoon, the level of incidents was similar to that of a normal day.
Special incidence in Australia and Japan
Australia woke up this Friday with the incident that occurred in Spain on Thursday afternoon. It has caused problems for businesses, which have experienced difficulties communicating, managing orders or sending invoices, and public bodies and services, including the Australian Revenue Agency and some courts. The fall has also affected the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the ASIO intelligence agency and Service NSW, the New South Wales state platform that allows procedures such as renewing driving licenses or managing registrations.
For this reason, the country's authorities have activated a clause in their digital resilience agreement with Microsoft to request that their interests receive priority in the recovery of services affected by the global fall of the American technology company.
The Australian Minister of the Interior, Tony Burke, explained this Friday that the Government had put in place this provision to ensure that the needs of the country are taken into account during the recovery of the systems. According to EFE, the agreement, signed in June, contemplates strengthening the resilience of Australia's digital infrastructure and prioritizing the recovery of its economy in the face of a serious interruption of the Microsoft ecosystem.
The fall of technology systems has also affected the Japanese Administration. The main spokesman for the Japanese Government, Minoru Kihara, confirmed to Reuters that the problems were basically communication and that no incidents had been recorded in health centers. “We have confirmed that the GSS, the infrastructure of the Government's information system, is also experiencing an interruption,” he said in statements reported by EFE.
Asia has borne the brunt. The Philippines and Singapore have reported problems with their public services. In the case of the city-state, the Ministries of the Interior and Health confirmed significant falls. In Thailand, four of the country's main banks have temporarily stopped services that involve the use of emails, while urging their customers to call by phone in case of emergencies, according to public broadcaster Thai PBS. In Malaysia, the National Cybersecurity Agency recommended all government agencies “to verify if their services have been affected” to immediately notify any operational interruption, with no reports of serious effects at the moment.
In Spain, 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.
A global fall
According to the company's own data, the affected Microsoft365 service has more than 450 million corporate users and 95 million individual customers. The Teams program, for video conferencing and other functionalities for work environments, has more than 320 million users.
Microsoft confirmed on Thursday afternoon in Spain that its 365 platform services had suffered a global drop. The company has confirmed on the social network The company has explained that the problems affect several connection methods.
The first notice stated that the problem was limited to America, but the company later confirmed that the failure may affect the connectivity of Microsoft 365 services for users "in any region." As the hours passed, the failure became global.
