The strife of the IT giant hits the custody in the USA

Microsoft says it has made progress after the technical problems that affected users in 74 countries. But wine growers in South Africa, courts in the UK and hospitals in Canada say they are still suffering from the disruptions that have led to major communication problems.

- I will not speculate on how long this can take, but it can obviously take some time, IT security expert Marcus Murray told DN on Friday morning.

The error reports started pouring in late Thursday evening, Swedish time. Outlook, Teams and Copilot are some of the services affected when a large number of the servers that run Microsoft's cloud services experienced problems.

Exactly how many were affected is unclear, but authorities in several countries have had to adapt during the day. The COP31 climate conference is taking place in Turkey. There, the operational disruptions have led to problems for the negotiators.

- We find it difficult to both open and share documents, says adviser Anna Hopper Schulz on site in Antalya, to the BBC.

In North America, the disruptions have been extensive, leading to disruptions in both Canada and the United States. Hospitals in the multimillion-dollar city of Toronto are urging patients to call the hospital's main number on Friday because doctors have been unable to communicate with them by email during the day.

In the US, the disruptions have led to more unexpected problems: a Colorado jail cannot release people whose bail has been paid because the receipt cannot be sent electronically.

"We regret what happened. Anyone who needs to pay bail for release must now do so in person at the jail," the sheriff's office wrote on X, which led to some sour comments.

Other industries have also run into problems. A wine grower in South Africa tells the BBC that his entire business has "ground to a halt" because communication channels with exporters have been cut off.

- It is incredibly frustrating and quite ironic that we are so advanced in AI and yet something as simple as Outlook not working can have such an impact, says South African winegrower Peter Pentz to the BBC.

On Friday afternoon, in several updates, Microsoft stated that the number of reported cases has decreased, but at the same time they admit that many people are still unable to log into their email account.

At the same time, Marcus Murray warns that fraudsters may try to strike once everything is working again.

- What we have seen before is that criminals take advantage of it afterwards, there is a wave of fake emails "from Microsoft" where it is written that "something happened to your account". There is a risk of phishing, he says.