Microsoft services are continuing to recover and return online after an outage affected millions of users.
The widespread disruption impacted several Microsoft services used by businesses, governments and organizations around the world, leaving many without ways to communicate and access files.
The services went down on Thursday, with users reporting that services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were not loading.
RELATED: UPDATE: Recovery continues for Microsoft services, millions affected by outage
Scott Beck, CEO of Moncton-based technology and cybersecurity company BeckTek, says the outage appears to have been caused by internal changes made to Microsoft’s network infrastructure rather than a cyberattack.
“Microsoft hasn’t told us exactly what happened, but they’ve indicated that networking changes triggered the issue,” Beck explained. “Think of it as the traffic cops that control how information moves around their data centres. Something went wrong, and it created a flood of requests that the systems couldn’t handle.”
According to Beck, the problem didn’t just affect one region or one data centre
“This impacted their infrastructure globally,” he said. “They’ve been rolling out fixes around the world, and we’re seeing improvements, but it takes time when you’re dealing with systems at that scale.”
As services continue returning to normal, Microsoft still faces the task of working through a backlog of emails that piled up during the disruption.
“There are likely huge queues waiting to be processed,” Beck said. “Most email systems will keep trying to deliver messages for up to 48 hours, so a lot of those emails should eventually arrive.”
While many users noticed problems sending and receiving email, the outage had a much broader impact.
“It was more than just email,” Beck said. “Microsoft Copilot went down. SharePoint was affected. For a lot of organizations, that’s where their files live now. If you can’t access those services, you may not be able to access the information you need to do your job.”
The outage quickly became a reminder of how dependent businesses have become on cloud-based platforms.
Teams were left scrambling to find other ways to communicate
“When they realized what was happening, the first thing they said was, ‘We need to send an email to our clients,'” he laughed. “Then they realized we couldn’t send an email.”
Beyond the inconvenience, Beck believes the outage will lead many organizations to rethink their backup plans.
“It’s no longer a matter of if something goes down,” he said. “It’s a matter of when. Companies need to think about how they would operate if a major platform suddenly became unavailable.”
The good news, Beck says, is that there is currently no indication that hackers were behind the outage.
“Everything points to this being a self-inflicted issue from a networking update,” he said. “There’s no evidence at this point that it was a cyberattack.”
