"Promising progress." Microsoft calms down after a global failure

The first signals about problems with popular Microsoft services appeared on Thursday. In over 70 countries, there were problems with access to services such as: Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do or Microsoft Purview.

Since yesterday, the company has been trying to control this situation. She provided the latest update on the progress of repair work at noon.

We are seeing encouraging progress in service recovery in Europe, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across more of the impacted Microsoft 365 infrastructure. The situation in Japan remains relatively stable, and North America is also seeing improvement; however, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues due to ongoing remediation efforts, it explained.

In an earlier announcement, we read that due to the Microsoft outage, the timeout for emails would be extended to 48 hours to "ensure that delayed messages are protected while services are being restored."

Email timeout is the maximum amount of time the mail server will wait to receive the message before returning an error message.

Significantly, Microsoft has not yet announced what led to the failure experienced by Internet users from various parts of the world. He only assured that it was not a hacker attack.

Michał Sajdak from the Sekurak.pl portal presented his suspicions on Radio RMF24.

There was probably a patch or change on the servers on Microsoft's side. At first everything looked fine. When Microsoft started to implement this patch around the world, it turned out that there were big problems - explained the expert.

Some servers stopped working. Millions of users didn't have enough servers to handle everything, and everything started crashing. People started refreshing, which multiplied the problems even more. This is now the most likely hypothesis - added the guest of Radio RMF24.

Sajdak pointed out that after the first repair attempts, the situation partially improved, but later the problems deepened and the company itself admitted that the failure was not under control. He added that such crises are usually solved much faster.