Microsoft outage disrupts businesses, governments globally

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WASHINGTON: A more than 12-hour outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams crippled communications for businesses and governments globally on ...

WASHINGTON: A more than 12-hour outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams crippled communications for businesses and governments globally on Friday, forcing some organisations to revert to fax machines and halting at least one bond repurchase in Europe.

Microsoft said server issues were behind the incident that also affected its Copilot AI assistant and that a broader roll-out of software fixes was starting to stabilise the system. It said it was not aware of any malicious activity.

Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications with hundreds of millions of users. The outage prevented people from ⁠performing essential functions such as sending emails, managing calendars, and hosting virtual meetings.

It affected government agencies from Australia to Japan and the United States, caused ⁠delays at trading firms, hindered some companies from publishing earnings and prompted airlines to warn customers of communication lags, according to public statements.

Organisations that host Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than in the cloud, were somewhat spared.

The outage is one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second disruption to its services this year.

Microsoft said the outage specifically ‌hit features tied to Exchange Online - its cloud-based email and scheduling hub - leaving unconnected applications ​operational.

The incident deepens questions about the global ⁠reliance on a handful of Big Tech companies that supply both the essential software and the cloud infrastructure that underpins it.

Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and also in October last year. Last month, it reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

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