Microsoft outage worldwide: Schools, hospitals and businesses come to a halt
A major technical failure in the servers and software of tech giant Microsoft has badly disrupted the daily work of many schools, health centres and businesses across the world. The problem began on Thursday (12 November). Microsoft’s popular services Teams, Outlook and the AI based software Copilot have stopped working.
Downdetector, a platform that tracks websites and online services, said users from more than 70 countries have reported problems with Microsoft services. About 43 crore people around the world use different services of Microsoft 365. Experts say the outage is very large, though no one knows exactly how many users it has directly hit.
The outage has stalled emergency and institutional services in several countries, including the United Kingdom. A general practitioner (GP) of the country’s National Health Service (NHS) said the failure could cause serious trouble in health services. Because email is down, many schools have asked parents to call them by phone instead of writing emails. Even the UK Parliament has set up other ways to communicate.
Businesses have also felt the impact strongly. Ms. Esther, a resident of Lancashire, said her team members cannot do any work as the system is down. Many of them are asking for permission to stop work and go home.
Some people shared a different experience. Mr. Martin said he felt relieved at first when he woke up and saw no emails in the morning. Then he remembered that today was the day to finalise a very important business deal.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is working hard to handle the situation. The company said its services are showing “early signs of stability”, but things are not fully back to normal yet. Earlier, Microsoft made clear that the outage was not caused by any cyber attack or security breach. Source: BBC.
