Microsoft: BSI sees failure as a major problem for the economy

The federal government sees the disruption of Microsoft services as having a significant impact on German companies. “The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is also in contact with Microsoft about this and assumes that the German economy will be very badly affected,” said a spokesman for the Digital Ministry in Berlin on Friday. "According to the current state of knowledge, there is no evidence of a cyber attack." Microsoft says it is making progress little by little in resolving the comprehensive disruption. There are no reports of major outages from the federal administration.

The spokesman said further lessons would be learned from Microsoft's disruption. »We see the importance of IT systems for the ability of companies to work, including administration. And that's why, from our point of view, there needs to be redundancies and alternatives that you can fall back on in the event of a failure in order to continue working," he added.

A long-lasting major disruption at Microsoft has cut off many companies, institutions and consumers worldwide from central cloud offerings since Thursday. Not only the Outlook email service is affected, but also services from the Microsoft 365 cloud package in general.

With the office communication service Teams, for example, planning meetings and calendar connections did not work properly. In addition, the AI ​​assistant Copilot, the management portal for administrators and interfaces to third-party providers - including AI services such as OpenAI and Anthropic - were temporarily disrupted. According to Microsoft's own statements, it is making progress little by little in resolving the extensive disruption to its services.

Microsoft rules out a cyber attack, but otherwise remains tight-lipped.