Microsoft outage: Millions affected in over 70 countries

Charlotte Gallagher (0:00)

This is The Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Charlotte Gallagher, and at 15 Hours GMT on Friday, the 13th of November, these are our main stories. A global Microsoft outage hit schools, doctors and businesses in more than 70 countries. Human skulls are discovered inside Haiti's National Stadium after troops from El Salvador seized it from a gang who'd held it for two years. The FBI says North Korean hackers used fake video calls in a $400 million crypto hack.

Also in this podcast.

David Silito (0:42)

Now here inside the cliffs, you can watch what was going on in this top secret bunker with its 1940s computer.

SPEAKER_4 (0:49)

Ready for action. Fire. Fire.

Charlotte Gallagher (0:53)

We go inside a secret second World War location.

Schools, banks, health and emergency services around the world have been hit by a huge Microsoft outage. It's caused major disruption in more than 70 countries. The tech giant is scrambling to fix the issue, but with so many of us relying on its products such as Outlook teams, the problems are being felt globally.

SPEAKER_5 (1:22)

We can't actually request prescriptions for our patients and GPs can't actually send us confidential patient information so they can't tell us when there's changes to medicines.

SPEAKER_6 (1:33)

We had a business meeting scheduled for today and had invited our business partners, but most of them couldn't use email, so we had to postpone it.

Jake Moore (1:43)

Can't communicate with the students or other teachers, so it's been tough.

SPEAKER_4 (1:47)

It's very strange, but I feel like it's kind of what's to come in the future. I mean, we rely so heavily on technology and these things these days, and I feel like now, this just goes to show that when these systems go down, we're all sort of a bit lost. We don't know what to do. I wouldn't be upset because it's Friday, so I wouldn't be okay.

Charlotte Gallagher (2:03)

Jake Moore is a cyber security advisor for ESET, a leading cyber security firm.

Jake Moore (2:08)

It does hammer home the point that our infrastructure is relatively old, and going back to the fact that we are just using a few providers, cloud providers, email providers, and so on, that when these things go wrong, they go catastrophically wrong.

Charlotte Gallagher (2:23)

The company says it's not found any evidence that malicious activity caused the problems, and in its latest update, it reported that broader improvements were being observed in North America and Europe. Just before we recorded this podcast, our technology reporter Laura Crest told me how the efforts to bring the systems back were going.

Laura Cress (2:41)

It's a very slow step-by-step fix. There has been now more than 20 hours that we've had this outage, but some people may see that they're starting to slowly get their emails back for Outlook. The reason it has taken so long is that engineers, they've hit this quite frustrating loop where essentially they would restart a server and let some people back in, but the sudden rush of all that returning traffic, that overwhelms the system and then it knocks it offline again.

Instead of flipping a big switch, essentially they're letting traffic back in, but it's very slow, so that's why it's taking a long time. They're trying to prevent another crash.

Charlotte Gallagher (3:20)

Are there some businesses, some people that have been affected more than others by this outage?

Laura Cress (3:25)

Essentially, anyone who uses Microsoft 365, virtually every sector that relies on these modern office tools will have been affected in some way.

I certainly was this morning when I was trying to get a hold of emails and things like that. But in terms of the impact, it will be things like health services, schools, universities, those that need to use those kind of urgent communications, have had to really use backup communication plans. I know headteachers are asking parents to phone in rather than send emails, and it's affected 70 countries across the world.

Police forces as well, emergency services, it really has hit every sector.

Charlotte Gallagher (4:05)

Big questions for Microsoft because people will be wanting to know what they're going to do to stop this happening again.

Laura Cress (4:12)

Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's inevitable that we may well see something like this again. I'm sure Microsoft, what it's going to do is tighten its checks to stop these servers from tripping over each other again. But experts will be asking, are you going to have a plan B for this for next time? Because this was something that seemed to be quite unexpected when it happens. They've stressed this isn't a cyber attack. This is essentially what happens when servers have dropped offline during routine checks, but too much digital traffic has been dumped onto the remaining servers and overloaded them. That's basically what has happened here. But it's essential really that we never have this huge scale outage again because it really has caused so much disruption today.