Microsoft reports encouraging recovery after global Office 365 outage

Microsoft said it is seeing “encouraging recovery progress” after an unprecedented outage that disrupted its Office 365 services worldwide.

According to outage tracker Downtracker, the first reports of problems with Office 365 emerged at 6 p.m. on Thursday and the disruption lasted roughly 18 hours. More than 140,000 users in 74 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia reported issues directly, although the service is used by about 450 million people globally.

The outage affected a range of Irish public bodies, including the HSE, local authorities and other State institutions. Healthmail, the national secure clinical email system for digital prescriptions, was unavailable across the HSE, and every GP in Ireland experienced delays, said Tadgh Crowley, chair of the Irish Medical Organisation’s GP Committee.

Microsoft attributed the failure to an “elevated load” on its infrastructure, with a large number of servers becoming “unexpectedly unavailable”, leading to further strain on remaining servers. The company ruled out a cybersecurity incident, stating the issue stemmed from a chain reaction linked to a global system update.

Ronan Murphy, chief executive of cybersecurity firm Smarttech 247, called the worldwide outage “unprecedented” and warned that such disruptions can attract fraudulent phishing attempts, as hackers exploit uncertainty.

Source: Irish Examiner. Photo: panumas nikhomkhai / Pexels.