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The American company Microsoft apologized to its customers in more than 70 countries due to the technical failure that led to the disruption of its services, starting on Thursday and continuing until Friday.
The company expressed its "deep regret" about the disruption of its services, including Outlook, Teams, and the artificial intelligence tool CoPilot, to more than 430 million people around the world who use the products affected by this disruption, which caused widespread disruption around the world.
Microsoft is seeking to restore its services after a global outage, but says that repair operations are not going “as expected.”
By Friday afternoon, services had generally begun to recover, about 24 hours after the problems began, with Microsoft reporting "encouraging progress" and that email flow was returning to normal levels.
This outage affected more than 70 countries, disrupting various sectors, from commercial operations and government services to individual users.
Microsoft explained that the defect was technical and resulted from a “network capacity upgrade,” stressing that it had nothing to do with cyber attacks or artificial intelligence systems.
Technology experts considered this incident a “strong reminder” of the extent to which companies and vital services depend heavily on a limited group of major technology companies.
Since Thursday, users have begun reporting difficulties in accessing Microsoft 365 products.
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By Friday, the effects of this widespread disruption had affected several institutions; From the Japanese government, the Supreme Court of the Philippines and the Australian Intelligence Agency, to the rail transport sectors, hospitals and courts in North America.
In the United Kingdom, the holiday disrupted the work of National Health Service (NHS) employees.
However, the Minister responsible for cybersecurity confirmed that the authority’s emergency services (999) and hotline services (111) were not affected, and the transportation sector did not witness any disturbances.
In Canada, hospitals and rail passengers were affected, while the United States saw court and government office services disrupted. The two countries are currently witnessing a gradual return to normal operations.
A cybersecurity consultant explained that the global impact will be “absolutely huge,” given that many companies rely heavily on Microsoft services.
Microsoft stated that it is working to gradually restore services, due to the "large volume of demand."
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