Microsoft Corp. said it was making progress in efforts to restore access to its flagship software and end an outage that has paralyzed government offices, traders and businesses around the world.
In an update posted at about 9 a.m. New York time, the company said it was seeing improvements in service availability, “with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.” Still, Microsoft warned that users of more than 20 products and services may continue to encounter errors.
Outlook, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence tool were among the services affected, leaving users with a second day of missed meeting invitations and unresponsive web pages. Previous disruptions at the company have rarely lasted more than several hours.
No clear cause, and no sign of an attack
Microsoft has provided near hourly updates since the problems started Thursday afternoon, occasionally pointing to signs of recovery that proved short-lived. It was still unclear what caused the outage, though the company described “a core process” on some servers becoming overwhelmed and causing them to stop responding entirely.
Initial efforts to identify the problem and deploy a fix were slowed by further server errors. Microsoft said it would provide more detail after the disruption was over and added that there was no evidence of malicious activity. The shares fell less than 1 percent as markets opened in New York on Friday.
Corporate fallout spreads
Companies that depend on Microsoft systems began adjusting their schedules. Swiss luxury group Richemont and US truck and bus manufacturer Workhorse Group Inc. postponed earnings releases this week, though Richemont has since filed its report.
PVH Corp., the apparel conglomerate that owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, announced Thursday that it would cut about 4 percent of its global workforce. Some of the difficult conversations scheduled to start in Asia on Friday morning did not take place because of the outages, leaving employees uncertain about their futures, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Public-sector disruption
The effects reached well beyond private business. In the UK, the National Health Service had to reschedule some procedures after the outage hit communications. Guy’s and St. Thomas’ warned patients that email was offline, though the hospital’s procedures were going ahead as planned. Several local police forces said they could not take crime reports online.
Japan's finance ministry said it had been unable to receive emails for most of the day. Without access to their inboxes, government ministries resorted to pinning up paper notices to inform journalists about daily schedules. Staffers at the Reserve Bank of Australia were also affected, though critical operations ran normally. In New Zealand, immigration officials paused processing of all visa applications.
Global reach
Traders in Singapore, Indian brokerages and officials in Tokyo reported problems with Microsoft services on Friday. Euronext sent a warning that its email communications were unavailable. Users in more than 70 countries reported problems, according to Downdetector, which recorded hundreds of thousands of complaints.
Cybersecurity software, file-sharing services and administrator tools were also disrupted. The company sells those products, along with workplace staples like Word and Excel, in a bundle under the M365 brand that has more than 450 million commercial users.
A reminder of concentration risk
The outage shows how deeply Microsoft's email, chat and corporate software are woven into daily work. It is also the latest example of the risks that come with relying on a small number of providers for critical technology.
"The technology market is concentrated among a few providers that deliver most of the services, and we take those services for granted," said Stefano Mele, a Rome-based senior lawyer at Gianni and Origoni who specializes in cybersecurity. "That concentration of hardware, software and IT services can create a problem when there are no backup services supplied by other providers, based in different parts of the world and operating under different national flags."
What comes next
Microsoft is continuing to route user traffic away from affected servers and restore normal operations. The company has promised a fuller explanation once the disruption ends, but the episode has already renewed questions about the resilience of the cloud services that much of the global economy treats as essential infrastructure.
