Microsoft 365 outage leaves NZ businesses scrambling as email and Teams fail

Detailed summary

Microsoft’s executive vice president Charles Lamanna says there is “no indication” the outage is due to “malicious or cyber activity”. The company revealed late Friday afternoon…

New Zealand businesses have been left scrambling to find alternative options for communication after a global Microsoft 365 outage took down email and instant messaging services on Friday.

The US software company which runs Outlook, Teams, Copilot and OneDrive among other services, says it is “actively monitoring” the performance of affected infrastructure and making efforts to recover server availability.

The outage began at 6.30am NZT on Friday and caused widespread disruption across the legal sector, with property settlements and court appearances on the line.

Microsoft’s executive vice president Charles Lamanna says there is “no indication” the outage is due to “malicious or cyber activity”.

The company revealed late Friday afternoon that steps taken which it hoped could fix the outage hadn’t worked.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” it said in a message on social media.

“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.”

Information Technology Users Association chief executive Craig Young said Microsoft customers should expect to be compensated “especially if any loss can be clearly shown”.

“It shows how reliant we can become on a single provider and is a warning to have disruption plans.”

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