WASHINGTON: A sweeping Microsoft outage plunged vital infrastructure into chaos across the globe on Friday, paralysing healthcare systems, freezing visa processing and leavingbusinesses struggling to operate.
The disruption went global within an hour, knocking out Microsoft 365 products including Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant, Copilot in 74 countries and territories, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
Microsoft attributed the connectivity errors to ‘elevated load’ on a portion of its infrastructure across multiple regions, adding it was ‘not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident’.
Although Downdetector reports began declining by 9am GMT, the tech giant reported difficulties in fully restoring service despite the fixes it had put in place.
In an update, Microsoft noted ‘broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia-Pacific’.
Across the globe, the fallout crippled vital public services. In the UK, a top trade union warned the outage was having a ‘serious impact’ on the National Health Service. Emergency call handlers were ‘unable to refer patient details in the normal way which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos’, said Rachel Harrison,public services head at the GMB union.
Meanwhile, Immigration New Zealand paused the processing of all visa applications until further notice. In India, airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air warned on X that email support services were affected and customer queries might not get through.
Japan’s Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa told Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun there was no doubt the outage would cause a ‘significant impact’, adding officials would ‘closely monitor the situation and take every possible measure to address it’.
In Australia, Australian Computer Society CEO Prins Ralston called for a national review of sovereign IT risk, telling publication Information Age, ‘We need to know the systems that keep this country running won’t simply fall over without notice’.
The failure also rattled the corporate world, exposing heavy reliance on Microsoft’s tools in London’s financial district.
‘I think one of the biggest things is Copilot not working, and you can sort of see the dependency now on Copilot, said Yashmit Sharma, an auditor.
Sheera, a risk manager at a mid-sized company, said businesses needed to be better prepared for unexpected technology failures. ‘Anything can happen: you wake up and Outlook is not working and it’s the main communication we use for our global team,’ she said.-AFP