Major outage at Microsoft. Systems collapsed in 74 countries, cost may exceed $7 billion

The global access problem, which hit Microsoft's core services such as Outlook, Teams and artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, spread to working hours in the Asia Pacific region after affecting thousands of users in the USA.

The disruption, which lasted for approximately 22 hours, paralyzed the communication networks of public institutions and giant technology companies around the world.

Microsoft announced that despite the technical interventions made on the servers, a permanent solution has not been provided yet and only a partial recovery has been observed.

In the latest statement from the company, it stated that positive developments had been made towards the return of services to normal and apologized to the users affected by the outage. The company announced that they are evaluating the reasons for the disruption and the steps that can be taken to prevent similar problems in the future.

While it is stated that the outages are effective in more than 70 countries, there is no clear data yet on the total number of users affected by the disruptions.

The company stated that the outage affected Microsoft 365 features connected to Exchange Online and e-mail infrastructure, and announced that services that do not rely on this system continue to work.

It was also noted that there was no information that there was any malicious cyber activity behind the problem.

While Microsoft's efforts to resolve the disruptions continue, experts have assessed that the economic cost of service outages may exceed 7 billion dollars. In the forecast published by the US-based think tank Anderson Economic Group, it was stated that a significant portion of many Microsoft users who were considered to be affected by the outage faced problems that disrupted daily functioning rather than a real loss of productivity.

However, the president of the institution, Patrick Anderson, stated that they estimate that the activities of approximately 26 million users yesterday and 51 million users today were disrupted to the extent of causing economic loss. Speaking to US-based CNN International, Andreson said, "This is an initial estimate, taking into account the limitations of what we know. We do not yet know the full extent of the disruption." he said.

Stating that some companies may receive compensation from cyber security insurance for the losses they experience, Anderson emphasized that this will not eliminate the cost in question and will only transfer it from Microsoft users to insurance companies. Anderson also suggested that Microsoft may have to issue refunds of around $800 million per day for services that customers paid for under contracts but could not access due to outages. Arguing that not all customers will request a refund, Anderson claimed that these requests could increase the total cost to over $7 billion.