Microsoft suffer system outage affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot, exec says there's "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity"

Well, that seems less than ideal

Microsoft 365 isn't quite living up to its name this week, as its services have suffered an extended outage that's knocked the likes of Outlook, Teams, and Copilot for six. As of writing, the company are finally reporting "encouraging recovery progress in Europe" and are busy "addressing the remaining areas of disruption", but that's only after chunks of November 12th and 13th have seen people, businesses, and institutions left unable to use stuff they rely on.

That latest update was given by Microsoft to the BBC, who've had a live report on the outage running, since it's affected the likes of schools, government services and medical services. IGN and Kotaku's reports differ on whether any Xbox services appear to be affected. The Xbox status support page currently indicates all is swell, but Downdetector does show a recent uptick in reports of issues.

"We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue," Microsoft exec Charles LaManna wrote in response to a support thread on the topic in the early hours of November 13th UK time. "We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."

As much as it's slightly reassuring that there currently looks to have been no big hack, the time it's taken to deploy proper fixes is concerning, with Microsoft noting some of their early attempts at rectifying things "not taking as expected".

The debacle has rather emphasised how far from ideal it is that so much key infrastructure across the world runs on one clump of tech which all go down in a heartbeat, but to a certain degree that is the peril of relying on anything. One can only hope that Microsoft's ongoing efforts to fire vast numbers of staff into the sun and embrace AI haven't factored into lots of their services going tits up for an inconvenient amount of time.