'Update Gone Awry,' Not Cyberattack, Blamed For Global Microsoft Outage

There have been a lot of memes and social media jokes flying around following Thursday's outage affecting Microsoft Outlook and Teams, the volume of which reflects just how many people out there rely on Microsoft products in their daily work lives.

One example:

Microsoft said Friday that it was seeing "encouraging recovery progress" as it was trying to stem the damage from a global outage affecting Microsoft 365 products, including its popular email platform Outlook.

"Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure," the company said in a 5:30 am PT update on X.

"Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs while we validate service consistency across connection methods," they added.

A subsequent post offered an apology, saying, "We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us."

And, the company said, "we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."

As the Associated Press reports, Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told reporters Friday, after speaking with a top Microsoft executive, that the company was likening the outage to the 2024 Crowdstrike meltdown.

As Burke put it, "They believe that they are dealing in some ways [with something] similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry."

In the case of the Crowdstrike incident, a bug in an update that was pushed out to its cybersecurity customers worldwide caused widespread problems, grounding flights, impacting hospitals, disrupting banking, and even taking TV broadcasts off the air, as the AP notes. Here in SF, it was even blamed on setting off fire alarms at multiple buildings around town.

The Microsoft outage reportedly impacted local companies across the industry spectrum, including OpenAI and Anthropic, because even high-powered AI companies still rely on old-timey email to communicate.

As the Chronicle noted, San Francisco city staff all began relying on phone calls and texts Thursday to communicate, because email systems at City Hall were down.