A widespread cyberattack has targeted Microsoft's core services, including SharePoint, Outlook, and Teams, causing significant disruptions for businesses and organisations globally. The incident has raised serious concerns about the resilience of corporate IT infrastructure against sophisticated threats.
Service Disruptions Across Multiple Platforms
Users began reporting issues early Wednesday morning, with many unable to access critical collaboration tools. Microsoft confirmed the outage in a statement, acknowledging that some customers were experiencing 'intermittent service degradation'.
Key Affected Services:
- SharePoint Online - file sharing and document management impacted
- Outlook Web App - email access intermittent
- Microsoft Teams - messaging and video conferencing disrupted
The tech giant has mobilised its cybersecurity response team to investigate the breach and restore services. Early indications suggest the attack may have exploited a previously unidentified vulnerability in Microsoft's cloud infrastructure.
Corporate Cybersecurity Under Scrutiny
This incident marks the second major disruption to Microsoft services this year, following January's Azure Active Directory outage. Security experts warn that such attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, targeting the very tools businesses rely on for daily operations.
Cybersecurity analyst Mark Henderson told The Independent: 'This attack demonstrates how dependent modern enterprises have become on cloud services. When these systems go down, it's not just an IT issue - it can bring entire organisations to a standstill.'
Microsoft has advised affected customers to monitor their service health dashboard for updates. The company has not yet provided an estimated timeline for full restoration of services.
