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Tens of thousands of users around the world are experiencing a global outage of Microsoft services, including the Outlook email client, the Teams video conferencing service and the Copilot AI chatbot.
All of these services, according to the corporation, suffer from “connectivity problems.” Microsoft's current assessment is that these issues are unlikely to be caused by a cyber attack.
According to the monitoring service Downdetector, problems with Microsoft programs were recorded in 74 countries within one hour. They are still going on, more than eight hours later.
According to Microsoft's website, its Microsoft 365 package is used by 430 million people worldwide.
Microsoft said it has released the update, but its rollout is taking longer than expected.
The company said its servers in several regions were immediately experiencing “increased load.” This means that the number of requests is higher than the servers can handle.
Services like Outlook can be noticeably slower: emails, attached files, and calendar entries may not open for a long time or not appear in the inbox. Prompts in Copilot may be processed slowly or may not be processed at all within the specified time.
The outage also affected some third-party services that are not owned by Microsoft. OpenAI and Anthropic have reported glitches in their products (large language models) where they interface with Microsoft products.
Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said he had spoken with Microsoft representatives in his country. He said they “don’t think they’re dealing with a cyber incident.”
Some analysts said that if there was no cyber attack, then what was happening should be called "incredibly incompetent," as Paul Spain of New Zealand consulting firm Gorilla Technology put it.
Companies have effectively “lost a working day,” he fumes.
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