Microsoft says it has made further progress in restoring its systems, which have been disrupted since Thursday night. The group announced on Platform X that repair measures had already been completed for parts of the affected infrastructure. Data traffic will now gradually resume. There have been improvements in key areas – such as access to email inboxes and processing emails. Many users in Germany have already noticed this with amazement when emails suddenly started arriving in Outlook again around lunchtime.
However, the company warns that there may still be short-term disruptions in isolated cases. Much as failures in power spread across the globe, recovery is now progressing gradually across different regions. According to the group, North America is seeing “more comprehensive and sustained improvements in much of Europe,” and there are also “encouraging signs of recovery” in the Asia-Pacific region.
The focus is now on “stabilizing the restored infrastructure, fixing the disruptions in the remaining affected areas and reducing the email backlog and queues.” In other words: Microsoft has found the problem and a solution for it, but the company's systems are still on shaky ground. Further errors could possibly lead to another collapse.
Back to paper
In Great Britain, the NHS (National Health Services) responded pragmatically to the massive data breach at Microsoft and activated emergency plans. In order to maintain basic medical care and appointments, “other IT systems or paper documents” are used, a spokesman explained in a statement to the AFP news agency. He admitted that the breakdown had affected work processes.
However, a union representative said the loss of Microsoft services would have a serious impact on British healthcare. NHS staff answering emergency calls "are unable to pass on patient information as usual, creating a massive backlog and the potential for chaos," said Rachel Harrison of the GMB union. Emergency calls were apparently not affected, but there were no life-threatening situations.
England's NHS said patients should continue to call emergency numbers or contact their local pharmacies if necessary. Meanwhile, the national pharmacy association told AFP the IT problem was affecting its members' ability to communicate with doctors, leading to delays in processing prescriptions.
Chaos? Not at the federal government!
Things look completely different in the federal administration. According to the federal government, the Microsoft disruption has no major impact on federal administration. “We have no reports of major outages from the federal administration,” said a spokesman for the Digital Ministry in Berlin. However, it is assumed that the German economy will be very affected.
The spokesman explained that the federal client was running stable as a standard IT workstation in the federal administration. This does not use Microsoft in the cloud, but is operated on its own infrastructure. However, not all authorities are yet using the federal client; it is not expected to become the standard across the entire administration until 2032. The uniform email client in the federal administration is running stable.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry said there was no knowledge yet that the ministry or related authorities were affected.
