Global "Microsoft" Service Disruption Paralyzes Work in 74 Countries

The technology giant "Microsoft" is grappling with a major global system disruption that has paralyzed the operation of popular tools such as "Teams", "Outlook", and the artificial intelligence assistant "Copilot".

According to the British broadcaster BBC, users worldwide are facing serious "connectivity issues", and the effects of the disruption are felt in at least 74 countries, affecting government systems in Singapore and Japan, as well as Australia's intelligence services and the communication networks of the Supreme Court of the Philippines.

The first signs of the crisis appeared on Thursday when the number of complaints on the disruption monitoring site "Downdetector" surged rapidly. By around 18:00 GMT, nearly 140,000 users had reported problems with "Outlook", which is more than 2,000 times the usual rate. Since other industry giants also use "Microsoft"'s cloud infrastructure, the disruption has triggered a chain reaction — artificial intelligence companies "OpenAI" and "Anthropic" have also announced disruptions in their tool operations.

"Microsoft" explains that the cause of the outage is "increased load" on the company's infrastructure. Some servers became "unexpectedly unavailable", resulting in the remaining servers being unable to handle the increased load. Although initially the technology company reported "positive results" in restarting systems, several hours later the company was forced to admit that the fixes were not working "as hoped", and work on resolving the issues in several areas is still ongoing.