Microsoft sees signs of recovery as South African businesses count outage costs - IOL

Microsoft says its efforts to stabilise services are showing positive results following a global outage that disrupted businesses and public institutions, including several in South Africa.

Microsoft has reported early signs of improvement in its efforts to restore services following a global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications, offering some hope to businesses and organisations in South Africa that have also experienced interruptions.

The technology giant said it was seeing positive results for server stability after applying a patch to part of its infrastructure, targeting an authentication and routing component.

International reports by the Associated Press and The Guardian said Microsoft was gradually bringing affected servers back online, although the company cautioned that it was continuing to monitor the recovery and had not yet achieved a full restoration of services.

Microsoft has ruled out malicious activity as the cause of a major global outage that disrupted Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services on Friday, while reporting progress in its efforts to restore normal operations.

The disruption has affected businesses, governments and potentially millions of individual users worldwide, with South African companies and public institutions also reporting problems with essential services.

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) said its technical teams were engaging directly with Microsoft over the incident, while the City of Cape Town and the Central University of Technology issued notices warning of disruptions to Microsoft-based services.

Absa reported intermittent difficulties accessing certain Microsoft applications, including email and Copilot, while Eskom said its email services had been affected, MyBroadband reported. Airline FlySafair also temporarily lost the ability to send and receive emails. Lesaka Technologies and Momentum Group have reportedly experienced problems, while medical scheme Bestmed warned customers that its email communications were affected.

Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated demand on parts of its infrastructure, although signs of improvement emerged by 09:00 GMT as reports of problems declined on outage-monitoring platform Downdetector.

In an update issued at 9:30am (South African time), Microsoft said it was "seeing positive results for server stability" after applying a software patch and was "working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online".

The technology giant also said it was "not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident".

Earlier in the day, Microsoft acknowledged that its attempts to restore services fully had not delivered the expected results.

"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," Microsoft said on X at around 5am (South African time), without providing a timeframe for when services would return to normal.

The disruption spread globally within an hour, affecting Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, according to Downdetector.

Japan's economy, trade and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa warned that the incident would have a "significant impact".

"Since this software is used by a vast number of people, we will closely monitor the situation and take every possible measure to address it," Akazawa told Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun.

Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air each said on X that their email support services had been affected, warning that they might not receive customer correspondence.

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) called for a national review of sovereign IT risks, with its chief executive, Prins Ralston, warning that smaller businesses might not have alternative systems available when Outlook goes down.

"We need to know the systems that keep this country running won't simply fall over without notice," Ralston said, according to ACS publication Information Age.

Immigration New Zealand announced that it had suspended the processing of all visa applications until further notice because of the Microsoft outage.

Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of disruptions "in the Americas", before confirming that the problem appeared to affect "Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region".

Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service, which includes widely used applications such as Outlook and Teams.

"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," Microsoft said on X.

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it added.

Thousands of users also reported problems accessing Teams and Microsoft's Copilot artificial intelligence assistant, according to Downdetector.