Microsoft outage continues into Friday, hitting companies and governments worldwide

(AP) From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue. Microsoft said in an update early Friday morning, Nov. 13, that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down. At 2:44 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday, the company wrote it had been seeing "positive results for service stability." "We're implementing these actions more broadly across affected regions as we seek to attain persistent recovery," Microsoft wrote on X, adding that it would extend email timeout to 48 hours. The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.” The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.” More than 130,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook earlier on Thursday although new reports have since fallen from that peak. A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control. Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue. Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution. “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote. U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage. In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday Microsoft had likened the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024. Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption. Full coverage: https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/nation-world/microsoft-washington-outage-outlook/507-5f09bf8b-b0f9-4b73-a77a-007159cbf155