Microsoft battling major Outlook outage

Detailed summary

Microsoft said "malicious" activity was not to blame for an Outlook outage that has left users around the world without its crucial services on Friday, but reported making headway…

Microsoft said it was seeing "improvements" for Outlook email and other services amid an outage that was disrupting public services and businesses around the world.

In an update early on Saturday (NZT), the company noted "broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia-Pacific."

The outage, which hit several Microsoft products, disrupted health care services, delayed corporate earnings reports and left schools struggling to communicate.

A top UK trade union said the disruptions were having a "serious impact" on the country's health care service.

National Health Service staff receiving emergency calls were "unable to refer patient details in the normal way which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos," said Rachel Harrison, public services head at the GMB union.

In London's financial district, several people interviewed by AFP said the outage exposed their reliance on Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.

"I think one of the biggest things is Copilot not working, and you can sort of see the dependency now on Copilot," said Yashmit Sharma, 26, an auditor. "I think this was the main bummer. And Outlook as well, of course."

Sheera, 40, a risk manager at a mid-sized bank, said businesses needed to be better prepared for unexpected technology failures.

"I think we need to be a little bit more careful," said Sheera, declining to give her last name. "Anything can happen: you wake up and Outlook is not working and it's the main communication we use for our global team."

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