Microsoft's global outage reaches its second day and halts activities in companies and governments

Microsoft is racing to restore its services amid a global outage that is harming companies and government agencies. Businesses that rely on Microsoft technology reported that they were unable to carry out their day-to-day operations or use essential communication tools.

The outage, which began this Thursday (12) and lasted until Friday (13), prevented many users from sending or receiving emails via Outlook. It also affected Microsoft Teams, the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant, and other Microsoft 365 services.

Richemont, the Swiss luxury goods group that owns brands such as Cartier and Chloé, was forced to briefly postpone the release of its half-yearly results this Friday, while the American electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the publication of its quarterly results.

OpenAI and Anthropic also reported bugs affecting Microsoft 365 connectors.

Microsoft said on Friday that it was "seeing early signs of stabilization" but that service capacity had "not yet returned to normal levels" as it continued to try to resolve the issue more than 16 hours after it began.

Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, said on X that there was no indication that the incident was caused by "malicious or cyber activity."

Government bodies in the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan were also hit, including the Australian police and intelligence services.

Luke Pollard, the UK's defense minister, said the government was assessing the "deeply frustrating" impact. He advocated that technological systems be more resilient and recovery be faster.

"I imagine that's the conversation a lot of my government cybersecurity colleagues are having with Microsoft right now," he told the BBC.

The NHS (National Health Service) was among the British public bodies facing outages this Friday, and some regionalized units advised patients to use the telephone instead of email.

NHS Grampian in Scotland said some GP practices were also unable to access online systems.

In Japan, the government and many large companies were affected by the outage. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki warned that the government's shared IT infrastructure, which relies on Microsoft, was experiencing disruptions.

In New Zealand, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a statement to inform that its "ability to receive emails has been affected by Microsoft's global outage." "It also affects all New Zealand embassies, consulates and representative offices around the world," the statement said.