Governments from Singapore to Japan report email and computer disruptions
In an update Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing initial stabilization and improvements in capacity as recovery measures continued on the failure, which by then had lasted several hours and affected many users, companies and some government operations, from Asia to the United States, as the company worked to bring the systems back.
In Japan, vice chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki said the disruption affected the executive branch’s computer infrastructure and that authorities were monitoring developments closely, adding that the government had put alternative communication tools such as telephones in place.
Microsoft said in an update on Friday that the disruption affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 products that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Users reported that Outlook, Teams and Copilot were down.
The Redmond, Washington company said it was testing different ways to identify the cause of the problem and return its servers to service, adopting what it described as a measured approach to identifying and repairing the affected infrastructure. Microsoft also said it had no indication the failure was caused by malicious activity, and that it would treat the incident with urgency and priority until it is fully resolved.
Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its Microsoft 365 applications. More than 130,000 users of the outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook earlier on Thursday, though new reports declined from that peak.
A series of company posts on X suggested Microsoft engineers were having difficulty getting the problem fully under control. Hours after announcing that it had successfully restored service functionality, Microsoft said it had updated its list of affected services and continued working on the problem. The company’s latest posts offered little hope to users waiting for a quick fix. In one update, Microsoft said it had monitored the state of changes applied to improve service capacity and confirmed that those changes were not having the expected effect.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Friday that Microsoft compared the current situation with the CrowdStrike failure of 2024. Burke said he had spoken with the company’s top executive in the country and with the government’s national cyber security coordinator about the global disruption. Burke told reporters in Sydney that Microsoft does not believe it is dealing with a cyberattack, and that the company believes it is dealing with something similar to what was seen with CrowdStrike, where an update went wrong.
In July 2024, a massive global technology failure grounded flights and affected hospitals, banks and retailers. CrowdStrike, the Texas-based cybersecurity company, attributed that problem to a defective update on computers running Microsoft Windows that let its systems send erroneous data to millions of customer machines.
The disruption reached companies and financial institutions. Workhorse Group Inc., a U.S. industrial technology company, delayed its quarterly earnings conference call because of the failure. Danny Lau, who runs an aluminium company in Hong Kong, said his firm’s Outlook accounts could not receive updates from customers in the United States, and that a prolonged situation could affect its production schedule. Some banks in Hong Kong, a financial center in Asia, also saw parts of their operations interrupted.
Air India said its flights were not affected but that it had temporarily redirected its email services to keep customer inquiries flowing, according to a statement. IndiGo, another Indian airline, reported problems with its email support services that affected its ability to receive inquiries, saying in a statement on X that its other help channels remained operational and its flights were unaffected.
Governments from Singapore to Japan report email and computer operations disrupted
The Singapore Government Technology Agency said government emails were down and that it was working with Microsoft to resolve the problem. The Supreme Court of the Philippines said in a statement on X that the Microsoft 365 outage had affected some of its operations, including email responses. In Japan, vice chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki said the disruption affected the executive branch’s computer infrastructure and that authorities were monitoring developments closely, adding that the government had put alternative communication tools such as telephones in place.
OpenAI and Anthropic reported separately that they had trouble connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the chain effects of outages as more people use AI platforms to interact with other companies’ software.