Wis. (WBAY) — Microsoft confirmed early Friday that email queues were approaching normal levels after an outage that affected 74 countries and territories a website that tracks cyber outages
Outlook, Teams and Copilot were inoperable for millions of users across public and private industry and government agencies worldwide.
Microsoft issued a public apology Friday morning for the disruptions. The company said the outage was caused by a technical issue and not a cybersecurity breach.
The company said the issue was introduced during a network capacity upgrade and surfaced during a network change.
Paul Barford, an expert in computer communication networks security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the outage highlights the struggles of large, complex global infrastructures.
“They were in the midst of a capacity transition, but it didn’t go well. And the problem is once something breaks in these capacity upgrades, it’s not uncommon for there to be cascading failures because everything starts moving around in the infrastructure to try to address the outage,” Barford said.
Dave Schroeder, director of national security initiatives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the outage shows how resources are concentrated in a small number of large vendors.
“What it reveals is really that we have these single points of failure that are more acute because you have a lot of resources concentrated in single large vendors like Microsoft, Amazon, Google,” Schroeder said. “This isn’t to shame any particular vendor, because this could really happen to any of them.”
Barford said the outage also renews the conversation about how dependent people are on globalized technology and why cybersecurity is more important now than ever.
“People do have to pay attention and companies do have to stay vigilant. And this is definitely sort of a call to reassess, even though it was infrastructure and not security. It’s always a call to pay attention to things,” Barford said.
Barford also argued that outages of this magnitude are rare, but cybersecurity risks remain constant.
Schroeder emphasizes concerns of having heavy reliance on technology across industries.
“But when we do have a problem, it impacts thousands of organizations, millions of people at once, and some of those things that we depend on are critical,” he said. “There are health care services, emergency services, and things that really are more than just an inconvenience.”
Schroeder said the outage may not have been caused by a cyberattack, but it offered a real-world example of how vulnerable modern society can be when so many critical functions rely on the same digital infrastructure.
“It really reveals just the level of dependency we have on these services,” he said. “That’s something that foreign adversaries are obviously interested in.”
Schroeder said the infrastructure could be targeted in an actual cyberattack.
“Could this be something that could be targeted in the event of an actual cyber attack? The answer is yes, it could be targeted,” he said. “And it just shows how vulnerable we are if you lose access to a major service like that.”
The total number of people affected has not been shared. The company reportedly has more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
Microsoft has said it will provide a full post-incident report once its review is complete.
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