// WIRED US/UK — HARDWARE & GADGET
The Microsoft Outage Is a Warning for the World
A dramatic Microsoft 365 outage impacting widely used services like Outlook, Teams, and Copilot dragged into a second day on Friday after the company failed overnight to resolve an issue that left institutions and individuals around the world without crucial communication tools. The services did seem to be on a slow path to recovery by midmorning on Friday.
“We’re observing sustained improvements in service availability,” Microsoft said in a statement posted to its status dashboard on Friday morning. The company had said on Thursday evening that its initial attempts to fix the problem were “not taking as expected.”
The outages have caused widespread disruption to schools, courts, governments, and law enforcement agencies—plus countless businesses and millions of employees—around the globe, highlighting how many of the world’s most crucial systems rely upon technologies from a small number of tech companies. And when they fail, the ramifications can be huge.
Microsoft has not said yet what caused the outage but has hinted that it was related to cascading server failures inside multiple data centers around the world that shifted too much load onto remaining operational machines.
“We determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure,” the company wrote in Microsoft 365 Status update on Thursday afternoon. “We’re testing a configuration change to address a problem that's causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable,” the company added a few minutes later.
An additional update a few minutes after that noted, “We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health.”
Microsoft emphasized repeatedly in statements that there was no indication of the outage being caused by a cyberattack.
“This is absolutely going to go down as one of the big ones, up there with the Facebook outage of October 2021,” says Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at monitoring firm Kentik. “We don't know the root cause yet, but it is interesting to break down the traffic by source data center. The recovery came in fits and starts and varied greatly by source, probably due to Microsoft's efforts to bring the service back online.”
A prolonged outage of such a critical underlying digital service is not unprecedented, but Microsoft has a special position among cloud providers as an older company that was already ubiquitous in global computing from the PC era. Many organizations integrate Microsoft productivity services at the core of their operations, simply because they have used Windows computers for decades and have longstanding relationships with Microsoft.
“What makes this particularly significant is the criticality of the services affected, especially email and communication systems relied upon by government and other essential organisations,” says Swapneel Patnekar, the CEO of Indian web security firm Shreshta IT Technologies. “The impact goes well beyond the inconvenience of a typical service disruption.”