Microsoft says outage that harmed millions of users is not related to cybersecurity or AI

In India, employees complained about delays and a drop in productivity at work. In England, the director of an energy company said that, without accessing her email, her morning was limited to sitting at her desk and waiting. In Japan, the failure caused communication problems between government ministries. The global crisis even hindered the progress of COP31, in Türkiye. A member of the Timor-Leste delegation said she was unable to access the climate negotiations documents.

The problems affected several so-called "Microsoft 365" products, such as email, a meeting application and the company's artificial intelligence tool. At an investment consultancy in São Paulo, on Thursday (12), many operations were half completed. This Friday (13) was at a slower pace.

"The day started a little later, let's put it that way. The email is returning now. Some meetings were postponed or even canceled and rescheduled", says Ramon Coser, specialist at Valor Investimentos.

Facing problems with the breakdown, the OAB had to appeal to the STF and the National Council of Justice to suspend and extend procedural deadlines. Reporter Janaina Lepri interviewed, this Friday (13), the president of OAB-SP, Leonardo Sica. On Thursday (12), at the same time, video chatting using the Microsoft service was practically impossible.

"Brazil's justice system is 100% digital. It is the most digitalized justice system in the world, and all communication between lawyers and the judiciary is basically via email, saying: 'Look, you have a deadline of three days to make this statement'. And the deadline starts to run the next day. In those two days, if a lawyer... Many lawyers had information like this to receive, he will not receive it, but the deadline continues to run. So, he could miss the deadline", says the president OAB SP, Leonardo Sica.

In the early afternoon of this Friday (13), Microsoft released a note regretting the inconvenience caused by the incident. He said the technical failure is not related to cybersecurity or artificial intelligence; which was caused by an issue during a network capacity upgrade.

"Today, the entire world depends on a few companies. Therefore, in fact, when one of these companies has severe problems, as is the case, the level of impact is generally very high. In a system so large, so interconnected, the turnaround is generally much slower, because there is something technically called a health check, which is the health of the servers that are returning, whether they are well enough to handle the new traffic that will be reestablished."