Microsoft Outage Comes After Pentagon Signed $9.7B Software Deal

Detailed summary

The outage has impacted governments across the world, as well as healthcare providers and a range of organizations.

A global outage impacting Microsoft comes just months after the U.S. Department of Defense signed a multi-billion dollar deal to use the technology giant's services.

It has raised questions over whether the Pentagon is wrangling with the same software and cloud-based services problems, which have affected governments and organizations worldwide for more than 18 hours.

The Pentagon said in May it would spent roughly $422 million annually over five years for Microsoft services as part of a $9.7 billion deal with Dell Federal Services.

It will provide "critical" Microsoft services, the department's chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, said in a statement at the time.

The deal brought together Microsoft software largely already used by the Department of Defense, the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. Coast Guard under one agreement.

Microsoft's widely used Outlook, Teams and Copilot software remained down for many users on Friday, wreaking havoc with everyday operations for businesses, health services and governments.

Shortly before 1 p.m. ET Thursday, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of users struggling to access some mailboxes in the U.S. and beyond. Within minutes, the software company said the issue was impacting users across the world.

Elsewhere, other nations saw government services go down. Australia's federal police and spy agency were impacted, although the extent of the disruption to services isn't clear.

The Pentagon has not confirmed whether any of its operations or communications have been affected.

Opening of the article, excerpted from Newsweek. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.