Microsoft showing 'encouraging recovery progress' following worldwide outage

More than 140,000 users across 74 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia directly reported issues with Microsoft services.

Microsoft is showing “encouraging recovery progress” following an unprecedented outage that rendered the company’s web services ineffective across the globe.

According to global outage tracker Downtracker, service reports about Microsoft Office 365 first arose at 6pm on Thursday and lasted for about 18 hours.

More than 140,000 users across 74 countries across Europe, the Americas and Asia directly reported issues with Microsoft services.

The expected number of effected users is likely far greater, with Microsoft Office 365 services being employed by about 450 million people globally.

The outage directly affected the HSE, local authorities across the country, and other State institutions. The most common symptom of the outage resulted in late reply to emails.

Chief executive of cybersecurity firm Smarttech 247 Ronan Murphy said the global outage was unparalleled in scale.

“To see a worldwide outage of this scale, I think, is unprecedented…this really was massive,” he told the Irish Examiner.

Microsoft said the outage was not a cybersecurity incident. It is believed the issue stemmed from a chain reaction of issues stemming from a global system update.

Microsoft attributed the outage to an “elevated load" on its infrastructure, and said a large number of servers became "unexpectedly unavailable", spurring further traffic on strained servers.

Across the HSE, Healthmail, the service's national secure clinical email used for digital prescriptions, became unavailable.

According to Tadgh Crowley, chair of the Irish Medical Organisation's GP Committee, every GP across Ireland was hit with the issue.

“[The outage' brought us back a few decades for a while… for people who be used to going to their get their regular prescriptions, they had to call to collect them in the surgery first, and then go on,” he said.

“If that had continued, it would have been very tough for elderly people or people who have an illness.” 

AI services like ChatGPT and Claude were also impacted by outages due to their connectors to Microsoft services.

Mr Murphy warned although the Microsoft outage in itself was not cyber security related, the outage was likely to provide fertile ground for malicious actors.

“We've seen a large concentration of fake phishing emails and social media links asking people to click on those particular links to try and establish and fix the problem, and obviously they're fraudulent.

“There's an old saying: never waste a good crisis. Hackers prevail when there's uncertainty and there's concern around these platforms functioning well.”