A global Microsoft outage that has affected millions of people was caused by “overloaded servers,” according to tech expert Bob O'Donnell. The company has attributed the problem, which continued to cause major issues on Friday morning, to “elevated load.”
Expert explains cause
Bob O'Donnell, founder of TECHnalysis Research, said the elevated load would have led to overloaded servers. He told the BBC: “A Microsoft exec posted on social media...'It is not cyber. It's not malicious'. It's simply they've overloaded these servers.”
He added: “Now, it's not a good sign. I mean, let's be honest. And I think the numbers are going to be millions.” O'Donnell also noted the widespread impact: “I've been affected for over eight hours here in the US. I know folks in India and Asia have been affected. I know folks in Europe have also been affected. So it's a big problem.”
Services affected and response
Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday. Issues were still being reported at 3am the following morning. Affected products included instant messaging service Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of its Cloud services.
Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack. “We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” he wrote on X. “We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”
Ongoing fixes and government impact
In an update on Friday, the tech giant said that although it had managed to get servers operating multiple times overnight UK time, those servers had crashed. Microsoft said it had tried several solutions, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes. “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported issues.
In Britain, Whitehall computer experts were assessing how badly the Government was affected. Defence Minister Luke Pollard told Times Radio: “We're looking across Government at the moment as to the impact of Microsoft services as one of the key providers, not just for Government services but industry services. We recognise that the outage has potential to cause a lot of trouble.” He added: “There's an awful lot of frustrated people this morning trying to get into their systems, trying to access their emails and other services that Microsoft provide. I want to see this fixed.” Multiple governments around the world, including in Australia, India and Japan, also reported Microsoft outages.
