Quick Summary
A huge global outage hit Microsoft systems last night that has caused major disruption worldwide.
Among those affected (apart from Microsoft’s own services) are airlines, broadcasters, hospitals and law enforcement.
You might have already noticed but Microsoft systems have suffered a huge outage worldwide, which has affected its own services and many other businesses. This includes broadcasters, airlines and banks.
In the UK, Sky News was unable to broadcast live for hours this morning, only returningto screens around 9.25am, while Xbox Live has been down for Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S owners since roughly 11pm last night (Thursday 18 July).
Some reports suggest that there was an issue with an anti-virus update that took down Microsoft servers globally. American Airlines, for instance, claims that a cybersecurity firm pushed a huge update that “bricked machines”.
We’ll undoubtedly find out the truth soon, but this is an issue on a massive scale due to the amount of company and public service IT networks that rely on Microsoft systems.
Microsoft itself is yet to confirm what has caused the issue, although its support page for 365 hints that it was a server problem: “A configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.”
Like Sky News, some systems are returning this morning – Xbox Live is back up and running, for example – but disruption continues in many fields.
The BBC reports that hospitals in multiple countries are having to reschedule operations, airlines have grounded planes, and many cash machines around the world are currently offline.
The Alaskan police even reported that their 911 services were down.
We’ll bring you more on the outage as we get it.
