Microsoft's big failure. New information about the causes

Microsoft said its consumer products and services were fully operational as of Friday. 16.10 GMT time zone (17.10 in Poland). The tech giant said on Saturday it was "monitoring the backlog of emails that accumulated during this incident" before declaring the enterprise services issue resolved, Reuters reported.

Hundreds of millions of users may have felt the effects of the failure

A global outage of Microsoft services on Thursday and Friday involves loss of access to email and office tools. Disturbances were reported, among others: in banks, courts and government institutions in 74 countries. They could potentially affect over 430 million users.

"We are observing promising progress in restoring services. Their availability and the efficiency of e-mail delivery are improving in an increasing part of the infrastructure affected by the failure," said Charles Lamanna, vice president of Microsfoft, responsible for the AI ​​assistant called Copilot, agents and the company's platform, in a statement sent to PAP. The statement was sent by the head of Microsoft's communications department in Poland, Romania and Moldova, Anna Klimczuk.

"We recognize that our customers rely on our services to complete important tasks every day, and we regret the impact this outage has had on those who rely on us. Our teams are reviewing the causes of this situation and how we can prevent similar issues in the future," it added.

What caused the failure?

Microsoft said on Friday evening that the disruption was caused by an overload in the process responsible for establishing secure connections on servers. The company emphasized that this was not the result of a cyber attack or malicious interference by artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

The company also indicated that the failure also affected the Copilot assistant. However, users around the world were most affected by difficulties in using tools such as Outlook, Teams, or Microsoft 365.

Reuters cited data from the Downdetector website, which recorded over 7.4 million reports from around the world. It was emphasized that at the peak there were nearly 20,000 of them. per minute, i.e. over 1.5 thousand times more than average.

The failure caused delays for trading companies, made it difficult for some companies to publish their financial results, and forced airlines to warn passengers about communication disruptions.

Reuters emphasized that institutions and organizations that maintain Microsoft services on their own servers and not in the cloud were less affected by the failure.