‘Chaos as overloaded servers’ cause massive Microsoft outage, say computer experts

Detailed summary

Millions of people around the globe are impacted by email and other problems

The Microsoft outage which has hit millions of people around the world was caused by “overloaded servers,” says a tech expert.

The computer and software giant has said that the problem, still causing major problems on Friday morning, was down to “elevated load”.

Bob O'Donnell, founder of TECHnalysis Research, explained that this would have led to "overloaded servers".

He told the BBC: "A Microsoft exec posted on social media...’It is not cyber. It's not malicious’. It's simply they've overloaded these servers.

"Now, it's not a good sign. I mean, let's be honest. And I think the numbers are going to be millions.”

Other experts outlined possible additional or other reasons for the outage.

Tom Worthington, Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing at the Australian National University, said: “Rather than a cyber attack, most likely this was caused by an update to software which contained a bug.”

Dr Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, added: "The Microsoft outage appears to have been caused by a misconfiguration of networking systems and infrastructure.”

Microsoft was on Friday scrambling to fix the problem which was impacting some of its most popular services.

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