Microsoft said on Friday that recovery efforts were ongoing after a major outage hit flights, police and courts globally. The company noted that “service health remains variable” as they work to fix overloaded servers. Many services faced disruptions when core systems failed, causing widespread trouble for users across the world.
Microsoft said in its latest update on Friday that recovery efforts were still ongoing.
“Global telemetry and customer reports show incremental improvement in several workloads; however, service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline,” the update said.
Earlier, Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”.
Meanwhile, many people shared memes, with some ruing the fact that Teams was still partly functional.
Here’s how the Microsoft mayhem started, why it spread and why a solution has been so slow to come.
How did the Microsoft disruption spread?
At the centre of the storm is Microsoft 365, whose interconnected services went from keeping work seamless to spreading the disruption.
The problem first emerged in Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email service that powers Outlook for businesses and organisations. Microsoft initially reported that users were having trouble accessing their mailboxes through both the web and desktop versions of Outlook.
The disruption then affected other Microsoft 365 services. This was because several applications rely on the same underlying systems. For example, problems with Exchange Online affected some Teams features, including calendars, meeting schedules and certain chat functions. However, not all features of these applications stopped working.
As Microsoft investigated, it found that a large number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable. This put additional pressure on the remaining servers, which had to handle more requests than usual.
The company later identified another problem. A core process running on the affected servers was becoming overloaded, causing them to stop responding. This further reduced the number of servers available to handle user requests.
Simply restarting the affected servers did not solve the problem. Some servers that Microsoft brought back online initially appeared to be working but stopped responding again when users began accessing them.
Microsoft has since tried several measures to restore services. These include shifting traffic through alternative routes, limiting some requests reaching the affected systems and rebuilding servers using an earlier software configuration.
Yet, despite Microsoft saying it is “aggressively pursuing all pathways”, a comprehensive fix has proven elusive so far. Some improvements, however, have been reported.
“We’ve made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region,” Microsoft said in an update on Friday afternoon.
Courts, police, flights affected
The Microsoft outage hit public services around the world, from Singapore’s government inboxes to Australia’s federal police.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government email services were down and that it was working with Microsoft to restore them. The Philippines’ Supreme Court said the disruption had affected some of its operations, including email responses. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage had affected government IT infrastructure and that officials were keeping a close eye on developments.
Australia’s federal police and domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, confirmed that the outage had affected their systems. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and that the company saw no sign of a cyberattack.
“They believe that they are dealing with something similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said.
The outage had a visible impact on sectors where even a short disruption can affect large numbers of people, particularly aviation.
In India, SpiceJet cancelled three flights from Delhi on Friday morning to Pune, Leh and Mumbai, and delayed two others to Darbhanga and Mumbai.
IndiGo said its email support services had been affected, though it clarified that its other customer support channels and flight operations remained functional.
Akasa Air also reported delays in receiving customer emails.
Air India, however, said its flight operations and communications channels were unaffected. The airline temporarily redirected its email traffic to ensure that it continued receiving messages from passengers.