Microsoft issues apology after widespread outage reported by thousands

• Microsoft has issued an apology after thousands reported issues with its products, including Outlook and Minecraft.
• The outage resulted from a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
• The outage affected Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Intune, and Entra.

Technology giant Microsoft has apologized after thousands of people worldwide reported issues with its products, including the email service Outlook and the popular game Minecraft. Downdetector, which tracks website performance, showed thousands of reporting problems on Tuesday afternoon.

The incident follows a major global IT outage less than two weeks ago that leftover eight million computers using Microsoft systems inaccessible, affecting healthcare and travel. This outage resulted from a flawed software update by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Microsoft reported that it has implemented a fix for the problem, which "shows improvement," and will continue to monitor the situation "to ensure full recovery."

However, Microsoft has separately informed people that it has "no ETA" for resolving the issue. The tech giant previously stated that it was "investigating reports of issues connecting to Microsoft services globally."

"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience," it said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

"Our experts are currently investigating the situation in order to resolve it as soon as possible."

The outage comes just hours before Microsoft is set to announce its latest financial reports at 22:30 BST. An alert on the technology giant's service status website indicated that the outage affected Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing platform behind many of its services, as well as Microsoft 365, which includes systems like Microsoft Office and Outlook.

The alert also listed Microsoft’s cloud systems Intune and Entra among those impacted.

"It seems slightly surreal that we’re experiencing another serious outage of online services from Microsoft," said computer security expert Professor Alan Woodward.

“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."

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