Microsoft's global outage may be worse than Amazon's or CrowdStrike's, expert says
Governments, hospitals, courts scrambled by global Microsoft outage.
TL;DR
- A global outage impacted Microsoft 365 services, including email, cloud, and AI functionalities, starting midday Thursday.
- Microsoft identified failed server health checks as the primary cause, stating there was no evidence of malicious activity.
- The outage caused significant disruptions to businesses, hospitals, police departments, schools, and government IT infrastructure.
- Financial transactions, legal work, and public safety communications were hobbled by the service disruption.
- Microsoft extended email timeout to 48 hours and acknowledged slow progress in recovery, with some servers becoming unresponsive again after being brought back online.
- Users reported issues with Copilot and Outlook, and expressed frustration over the prolonged downtime and its economic impact.