Microsoft says its services are fully restored after global outage hits governments | Microsoft

Microsoft said its service has been fully restored after a massive outage that caused widespread disruption to governments, businesses and utilities around the world.

The technology company announced Saturday morning that it had restored service to remaining customers affected by one of the worst IT outages in years. On its Microsoft 365 status page, the US-based company said: “We have completed our efforts to resolve the underlying issue of the incident and have restored service to the remaining affected customers and regions.

“Further updates can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center.”

The outage, which began Thursday, affected governments, courts, health services, businesses, airlines and banks. Governments, including those of Japan, Singapore and Australia, said the hours-long episode affected some of their operations.

In the UK, where NHS England has agreed a five-year deal to use Microsoft 365, vital public services have been hit, with hospital staff resorting to paper records and a union reporting that ambulance services have suffered a “serious impact”.

The already congested court system was also hit, with jurors in some cases sent home early or prisoners not sent to court, while at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester staff scrambled to locate a fax machine.

Across the United States, school districts have asked parents to contact their child’s school by phone or through online apps, while House staffers told Politico they lost a day of work.

A Colorado detention center said it was unable to accept payment of bail online to release inmates and asked anyone needing to post bail for immediate release to do so in person at the jail.

In Australia, many people using Microsoft 365 have reported being unable to access their inbox, including in local councils, courts and schools. The federal police and Asio, Australia’s national domestic security and intelligence agency, were also affected by the outage.

Asio chief executive Mike Burgess said the agency’s systems “operate at multiple levels”, adding that they had been affected “at one level, yes, but not completely”.

Across Europe, government agencies in the Netherlands, Belgium and France have reported problems, with one French municipality asking citizens to use the telephone instead of sending emails.

In Japan, government email services became unavailable and staff resorted to text messaging. Shipping company Sagawa Express was unable to accept some online reservations while Taisho, a major pharmaceutical company, said it had to process orders over the phone.

Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected, and Taiwanese security companies, life insurers and investment trust companies told Reuters that fund management services had been disrupted.

Users reported that Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and AI assistant Copilot, were down. Downdetector, an online tracker, said it had received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories.

About 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website. The problems started around midday in the US on Thursday and around 6pm in the UK.

The Washington-based company apologized Friday for the disruptions and said the outage was “not related to cyber agents” or artificial intelligence agents. It said the incident “was introduced by an issue in a previous network capacity upgrade that emerged” after a recent network change.

These disruptions are the latest example of the cascading problems that can arise when multiple communications and technology platforms rely on the same vendor. The outage fueled concerns in the UK about over-reliance on a small number of technology companies.

Steven Murdoch, professor of security engineering at University College London, told the Guardian that an outage of this scale was usually “the result of a surprising interaction between systems. Each of the systems is normally quite well understood, but the interactions between them are complex and are often the cause of significant outages like this.

“It is very difficult to build a complex system without risking failure.”

Tim Clement-Jones, former chairman of the House of Lords artificial intelligence select committee, said widespread outages of vital government services were an “I told you so moment” highlighting Britain’s reliance on US technology.

Jeremy Singer, professor at the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, said: “This issue highlights the dependence we have built on a business’s digital infrastructure and may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem. »

The total number of people affected is unclear, but Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services.