Microsoft hit by global outages: What happened and why?

ملخص مفصل

Outlook, Teams and Copilot remain disrupted in 74 countries as Microsoft reports ‘marginal success’ in fixing outage.

Microsoft says it has had only “marginal success” in restoring its most widely used workplace services, more than 12 hours after a global outage knocked out Outlook and disrupted Teams and Copilot for users in 74 countries.

In a statement on its service health page early on Friday, the company said it was monitoring activity across regions to assess server status and find ways to improve capacity. “This includes reviewing server performance and confirming that developed patches have been applied and working as intended after infrastructure reboots are completed,” it said.

Here is what we know about the outage, what caused it and when services might return.

Problems with Microsoft products began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users began reporting that they could not access Outlook, its email platform. Within about an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories.

Microsoft first said it was investigating problems in the Americas, but later confirmed that users in any region could be affected. It said the affected infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which was likely contributing to the connectivity errors.

The company later said a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, and that the elevated load had not been caused by an increase in traffic.

The disruption dragged on through the US working day and into the night. By Friday morning in Europe, it had still not been resolved, and servers Microsoft had restored were failing again.

“I don’t think it’s unprecedented. I mean, the scale is impressive,” Rupert Goodwins, a technology analyst and journalist, told Al Jazeera “It’s very embarrassing for Microsoft and really, really annoying for the rest of us.”

Microsoft has not confirmed the number of users who have been affected.

مطلع المقال، مقتطف من Al Jazeera. لقراءة المقال كاملًا، افتحه على موقع الناشر.