Microsoft experiencing new outages just weeks after global Crowdstrike chaos
Less than two weeks after Microsoft faced a global outage, it has been hit with another major setback, which has apparently taken down some of its 365 services, including Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The company said it is “currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features” in a statement shared on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.
FILE PHOTO: A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France, March 25, 2024. (REUTERS / Gonzalo Fuentes)
Microsoft faces fresh set of outages days after global IT meltdown
Although cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike sparked the weeks-old worldwide chaos with a corrupt update, the current disruption hasn’t yet been linked to the software company. On Tuesday, an alert for “network infrastructure” popped upon the Microsoft service status website, foregrounding that access to Microsoft Azure had been impacted.
The cloud computing platform supports several services. Disruption of its operations inevitably hampered communication between apps, users, devices, and the internet.
Also read | Google responds to Elon Musk’s allegations of ‘search ban’ on Donald Trump
The outage was discovered as soon as user reports of problems with Outlook and other apps spiked on DownDetector on Tuesday morning.
Thousands of users also reported issues with the email service.
Per Microsoft 365 Status’ official update on social media, the company “applied mitigations and rerouted user requests to provide relief.” Meanwhile, Microsoft Support officials issued an apology online: “We’re sorry to hear you’re running into issues with our services. Our experts are currently investigating the situation in order to resolve it as soon as possible. You can find updates here: https://msft.it/6017ljML3. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.”
Also read | X suspends White Dudes for Harris account after $4m fundraiser, organiser claims Elon Musk got ‘scared’
Per BBC’s reporting, computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward critically commented on the failure of Microsoft’s network infrastructure, which was meant to be “bomb-proof.”
“It seems slightly surreal that we’re experiencing another serious outage of online services from Microsoft,” he said.
“The culprit appears to be network infrastructure but you would have hoped that with such important cloud-based systems there would not be a single point of failure.”
“You’d expect Microsoft’s network infrastructure to be bomb-proof,” he added.
