Major outage has occurred in Microsoft services: the situation in Ukraine

A major outage affected Microsoft 365, cutting people off from email. UNN reports this, citing The Verge.

Details

From approximately 8:00 p.m. Kyiv time on Thursday, November 12, reports have been coming in from around the world that people are unable to access their Outlook email, either via the web or through the apps.

Microsoft quickly acknowledged the issue on its Microsoft 365 Status account, stating: "We have identified that part of the infrastructure is experiencing increased load in several regions, which is likely contributing to connection errors."

There were also some reports of problems with Teams, but not to the same extent, while Microsoft's official updates said that customers might experience issues with the 365 suite of business services. Microsoft Communications Director Ben Hope said: "We are aware of and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily Exchange Online. We appreciate our customers' patience as we work to restore services as quickly as possible."

Several hours later, Microsoft published several updates on the problems and attempts to fix them, saying that it was experiencing issues restarting the servers and monitoring their status.

As of 1:00 a.m. Kyiv time on November 13, Microsoft had posted a notice saying that it had managed to restore some of the affected servers.

"We have started bringing some of the affected servers back online, and they remain stable so far. We have also redirected traffic and connections to alternative paths where possible, and are seeing limited recovery in some regions. We have streamlined the recovery process to accelerate bringing the remaining affected servers back online. To further support recovery, we are implementing traffic-management safeguards at a certain location to reduce the load on the affected infrastructure, and we will extend these measures to additional locations if we see positive results," the statement said.

As of 8:45 a.m. Kyiv time, the Microsoft Service Health Status website reported "degraded performance of Microsoft 365 services (Business or Enterprise) and Microsoft consumer products." 

"Users may be unable to connect to several Microsoft 365 services," the notice regarding Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) said.

As the BBC reported, tens of thousands of users around the world were affected by the global outage of Microsoft services, including the Outlook email client, the Teams video-conferencing service, and the Copilot AI chat.

Copilot prompts, it was noted, may be processed slowly or may not be processed within the allotted time at all.

The outage also affected some third-party services not owned by Microsoft. OpenAI and Anthropic reported outages in their products (large language models) in the part where they connect with Microsoft products.

The situation in Ukraine

According to the Downdetector monitoring service, the Microsoft 365 outage also affected Ukrainian users.

As of 8:30 a.m., there were reports of users experiencing problems with its operation.

Most reports of problems concerned login (37%), the app (30%), and saving/synchronization (20%).

Microsoft: 8.5 million computers affected by global IT failure21.07.24, 06:43 • 22751 view