Microsoft meltdown: Caused by AI? A cyber attack? Your questions answered

Microsoft users continued to experience disruption today as the tech giant worked to resolve outages impacting some of its most popular services.Affected products included instant messaging service Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of its Cloud services, among others.The issues began on Thursday afternoon as monitoring website Down Detector recorded an enormous surge of outage reports.By 18:00 GMT, Microsoft users had logged nearly 140,000 reports of issues with Outlook, over 2,000 times normal levels.As of 8:00am GMT this morning, over 7,600 outage reports of service disruption, as users reported being unable to receive emails, use the app, or log in to their accounts. The service disruption has affected customers worldwide, even knocking out email services behind the 'Great Firewall' in China. In a post on X, Microsoft says that it is 'continuing to work on' recovering services, but there is no clear timeline for when normal function will return. Shortly after 4:00am, the company said it was seeing 'partial recovery' across some regions but that this was not 'resulting in sustained recovery'. Microsoft users continued to experience disruption today as the tech giant worked to resolve outages impacting some of its most popular servicesWhat has caused the outage?In several notices posted on social media, Microsoft said it was investigating the disruptions and that parts of its infrastructure were 'experiencing elevated load' - which it said was partly to blame for the connectivity errors.In a post on the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, Microsoft indeoendent advisor Darren Bruce wrote: 'Microsoft has identified that the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.'They added that the company was 'investigating an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic.'The company determined a number of servers failed during automated health checks and that its alternatives to bring those servers back online were not immediately taking effect.Dr Mark Gregory, Associate Professor of the School of Engineering at RMIT University, says: 'The Microsoft outage appears to have been caused by a misconfiguration of networking systems and infrastructure.'Likewise, Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor for ESET, told the Daily Mail that the error most likely stemmed from 'failed servers'. Could this be AI?Microsoft has not yet revealed the root cause of the incident, but American AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic said they had both faced issues with Microsoft connectors.OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said: “We’re investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected. We’ll share an update when we know more.”However, the Microsoft outage was caused by an internal server overload and traffic imbalance within Exchange Online.This means that as far as we know, AI tools such as Copilot only went offline as a side effect of losing their underlying cloud connection - rather than causing the crash themselves.What services are being impacted?Affected products included instant messaging service Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook email and some aspects of Microsoft's Cloud services, among others.In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 services that depended on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional.Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.When will it be fixed?Microsoft is struggling to fix the widespread outage, with the company having acknowledged that efforts to restore services were 'not taking as expected'.The company said that although it had managed to get servers operating multiple times overnight UK time, those servers had crashed.The tech giant said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.Is it a cyber attack?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.”Microsoft added in a statement that it was ‘not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident’.How many people are impacted by the Microsoft outage?More than 430 million people use Microsoft’s suite of subscription service apps, though the company has not confirmed exactly how many users are affected by the outage.Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed 140,000 people had flagged problems with Outlook at 6pm last night.How did the outage develop?Microsoft's outage reports reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on Downdetector.Microsoft says the incident began at 4.17pm UK time yesterday.Reports to Downdetector about Outlook began climbing at about 5.25pm.By 6.25pm, reports about five Microsoft services combined reached 19,650 a minute, against less than 15 a minute on an average Thursday.Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level. At 7.38pm, reports were running at more than 11,000 a minute. Has this ever happened before?This is the second disruption to Microsoft's 365 services this year, raising concerns that repeated failures could push corporate clients to question Microsoft's reliability.Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and also in October last year.Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.How will investors react to the outage?Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely look past the outage but that repeated disruptions could hurt Microsoft over time.'I think investors will take this in their stride for now, because very few of these customers can realistically walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight,' Mr Gilbert said.'The bigger worry is that this isn't the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider's hands.'The market will want to see Microsoft prove it can keep the lights on before it asks customers to spend more on Copilot.'How are other countries being impacted?The outage is affecting users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.The US House of Representatives said the outage impacted its users and its engineers were working with Microsoft.Australia's spy agency and federal police were also among organisations caught up in the outage.Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that the outage was affecting the government's information system infrastructure.New Zealand’s foreign ministry sent a notice saying its 'ability to receive emails has been affected by the global Microsoft outage'. This was impacting all New Zealand embassies, consulates and representative offices around the world.Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were impacted.The outage also disrupted fund management at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies.