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Microsoft's servers are facing technical problems since Thursday. Due to this, many online programs of the company including the popular email service of Outlook have been affected.
According to Reuters report, Outlook email, Teams messaging app and other Microsoft 365 services remained down several hours after the technical problem began.
Microsoft said in its latest update that the changes made to improve services and fix this problem are not working 'as expected'.
The company is looking for other options to solve the problem. Its objective is to give access to its platform to as many users as possible, so that there is no unnecessary pressure on the system.
Earlier, the company had warned that due to increase in traffic on the services which have been restarted, they may stop working again.
According to Microsoft, this problem has come to light in many areas of the world.
"This issue may cause difficulty for users in any region in connecting to Microsoft 365 services," the company had previously said in a statement on X.
The company further said, "Many servers have suddenly gone offline, placing excessive pressure on the rest of the infrastructure. We are working to restart them safely."
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Many countries including India and China have been badly affected by this technical problem called outage.
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According to Mumbai-based BBC correspondent Rachit Prasad, the work of many people is being affected due to the outage even after 11 am local time in India. Emails are not arriving and calls on Teams are also not going through properly.
Some people associated with the equity market said that they panicked when they realized that they were not able to see the daily research report before the morning meeting. It is in this meeting that they take important decisions of the day.
India's largest airline IndiGo has said that the disruption in Microsoft's services has also affected its email support services.
IndiGo, which has more than 60 percent share in the country's domestic aviation market, said in a statement that it was not receiving emails. The airline has appealed to passengers to use other means for help.
At the same time, the country's second largest airline Air India used this opportunity to promote its flights.
Air India wrote on social media platform
43 crore customers of Microsoft 365 apps
A Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters that the problem was primarily with Exchange Online. This is the service that manages the mailbox of Microsoft 365.
The Microsoft 365 platform supports many services. These include Outlook, Office Suite, Copilot Chatbot and Teams instant messaging service.
According to Microsoft's website, more than 43 crore people use Microsoft 365 apps. More than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Copilot.
According to the platform that tracks outages, the number of companies using Microsoft 365 is between 30 lakh and 40 lakh.
DownDetector, a website that monitors outages, said that the impact of this interruption in Microsoft's services was seen in 74 countries within about an hour.
According to Indian time, around 11:30 pm on Thursday, complaints of problems in Outlook increased to about 1 lakh 40 thousand worldwide. This was more than 2,000 times the normal level.
According to DownDetector, the first complaints were registered shortly after 9.45 pm on Thursday.
Large scale services stopped
According to BBC Mundo, Australia's Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said he has spoken to Microsoft representatives in his country. According to him, company representatives do not consider this an incident of cyber attack.
Burke told reporters on Thursday, "They believe this situation is somewhat similar to what we saw with CrowdStrike. That is, an update went wrong."
He said the problem was "primarily affecting the email system."
Microsoft attributed the disruption to its services to "extreme pressure" on its infrastructure in several regions.
This means that its servers are working beyond their normal capacity.
The company that makes Windows told X that the problem was not due to increased traffic. Instead, many servers went "suddenly offline", placing undue stress on the rest of the infrastructure.
This outage is also affecting the services of OpenAI and Anthropic's Artificial Intelligence Platform.
Paul Spain of New Zealand consulting firm Gorilla Technology said that if this is not a cyber attack, then it is a case of 'an incredible level of negligence'. Its economic impact could reach millions of dollars.
He said that due to unavailability of email and other services, 'almost a day's business has been affected' of the companies.
What is the company doing to restore services
Microsoft had earlier said that it was working on "an alternative method" to restore services.
The company said, "We are now implementing this change on a larger scale. Along with this, we are also preparing automated recovery systems. These systems will continuously identify such servers that have stopped responding, and restart them. This will help in maintaining the stability of the services while the change is implemented."
However, a few minutes later the company said, "The steps taken so far have not provided the relief we expected."
The company had announced earlier in the day that it had fixed a technical issue in Teams that affected users in North America. According to the company, this problem was completely fixed.
Later the company said that this problem may affect users in other regions when connecting to Microsoft 365 service.
OpenAI, the company that runs ChatGPT, said it is investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors.
This may result in new connections being affected and tools not working as expected.
At the same time, Anthropic said that it has identified an issue related to a large service provider, which is affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Published by Collective Newsroom for the BBC.
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