Microsoft has ruled out malicious activity as the cause of a major global service outage. This outage disrupted businesses and government organisations across several countries. It affected Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services, leaving users unable to access essential communication tools.
The company said its initial investigation had found no evidence of a cyberattack. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna confirmed the position in a public statement on November 12.
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"We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity," Lamanna said.
The outage began on Thursday and continued into Friday. Microsoft users reported problems accessing email accounts and online applications. Several organisations also experienced interruptions to their regular operations.
Downdetector noted that more than 130,000 complaints of Outlook issues were logged during the peak of the outage in the United States. There were also complaints from Outlook users in Asia and Europe.
The issue impacted governmental organizations in Australia, Japan, and the US. Issues were reported by government departments regarding email communication and internal systems. In Australia, the government organizations announced that some customers would have trouble sending or receiving emails from government organizations. Police and intelligence organizations were also experiencing service issues.
The government of Japan said that its IT infrastructure was affected. Also, several business organizations had problems with their daily operations. The outage also impacted the services of Microsoft's clients, not only Microsoft itself. For example, AI organizations OpenAI and Anthropic were also affected by the issue.
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Microsoft initially found it difficult to restore normalcy. Engineers examined the performance of servers and tried to ease the pressure on the infrastructure that had been impacted by the problem. Later, Microsoft announced improvement after using a patch to some of its servers. The company stated that it had achieved positive outcomes through these efforts.
Microsoft also increased the server capacity and restored the systems affected in various parts of the world. The company announced that it will release a full report once the problem is solved. This event has demonstrated the reliance of business organizations and government institutions on Microsoft's cloud services.
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