NATIONAL NEWS - Recovery efforts are ongoing to reconnect Microsoft users across the globe to its services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, following a worldwide outage on Thursday 12 November.
Microsoft 365 posted on its X account that the issue was initially thought to be confined to the Americas, but posted again later on that the outage was affecting several regions.
It said in another post that although the disruption was attributed to an elevated load on its infrastructure, it later determined the issue lies with several servers being unexpectedly unavailable, thus straining the remaining infrastructure.
However, it later said that the restored servers can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic, and that it is analysing diagnostic data to determine what’s triggering the behaviour.
“In parallel, we’re temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in some locations. Additionally, we’re rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous configuration to validate if this prevents them from becoming unresponsive.”
According to Microsoft’s Health Service Status update from just after 12:00 this afternoon (10:00 for UCT), recovery actions are ongoing and have progressed in phases across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure.
“Global telemetry and customer reports show incremental improvement in several workloads; however, service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.
“Network and traffic management actions remain active. To protect email during recovery, we’re continuing to prioritise queue and backlog processing, and the email timeout window has been extended to 48 hours to preserve delayed messages.”
It added that it has no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident at this time. “We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.”
Another update is expected after 13:00 (SAST).
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