Countless people are unable to send or receive emails using Outlook, or access certain files or details on their calendar apps. Disruption to Microsoft services has hit millions of customers worldwide and has dragged on for hours. Companies and government operations across the globe have been hit as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.
According to Microsoft, the global outage was not caused by a cyberattack of any kind. The core cause of the issue has been identified as an "elevated load" on its infrastructure. The BBC explains elevated load as the situation or condition in which servers are handling a much higher volume of stress than they usually do.
Microsoft reportedly claims that several of its servers became "unexpectedly unavailable", which caused an elevated load on the rest of its servers that were functioning normally. This added traffic to the remaining servers derailed their capability to respond effectively—causing the global outage.
The British government has asked a team of its engineers to join their Microsoft counterparts in the effort to resolve the issue on a war footing. While the company has confirmed progress, complete restoration may take a reasonable amount of time.
"Early signs of stabilisation" was the term used by the tech giant to indicate progress, though it added that the service capacity of its servers has "not yet returned to normal levels".
According to the BBC, Microsoft is reviewing server performance as well as confirming that developed patches have been applied and are working as intended after infrastructure reboots are completed. "We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution," the company had said.
Microsoft outage: Gradual progress, but far from success
Earlier, 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 had managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of affected 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.
It says it is not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident and will give full details of "the root cause" in a post-incident report once it has been mitigated.
