Welcome to the new era, folks, where we increasingly seem to be heading closer to a daily coin flip over whether our core online services stay live or go down. This time, it's Microsoft. Down Detector reports problems with Microsoft 365 services since about 12:30 pm (ET) yesterday, November 12, and issues are still ongoing.
Countries across the world are affected, and some institutions have been affected severely. Parts of the UK government, for instance, are having problems sending and receiving emails. The UK's health service, the NHS, has reportedly said it is unable to access online consultation for patients. The US and other governments have reportedly been impacted, too.
Microsoft explains that certain features of services "that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted." So, it looks like Exchange Online could be the culprit. This is the back-end of Microsoft services that use calendars, tasks, emails, and so on.
Affected services include MS365 admin center, apps, Education features, Copilot, Defender for Office 365, Defender XDR, Fabric, Graph, Intune, Planner, Power Apps, Purview, some elements of Teams, To Do, SharePoint Online, Universal Print, and Windows 365.
In other words, a very extensive list. It's also a list that a bunch of institutions and companies rely on to manage their day-to-day, thus why this is such a big deal.
The latest update from Microsoft, at the time of writing, explains:
"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 prioritize queue and backlog processing, and the email timeout window has been extended to 48 hours to preserve delayed messages.
"At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. 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."
That there is "no evidence of malicious activity" as the cause is promising, but it doesn't stop this from being a severe event that's causing a ton of problems in a ton of countries.
This is the big risk of relying on a single kind of service for all your important online dealings. We saw the same risk bear fruit last year with a global AWS outage that took out a load of online services for a while, and recently we saw similarly widespread issues as a result of PHP vulnerabilities.
We're seeing more and more as time goes on that services from big, usually-reliable companies aren't immune to catastrophe. Let's hope Microsoft figures this one out ASAP.
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