The disruption affected Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services, with businesses across the island, including from the finance industry, among those impacted.
Microsoft said the problems were linked to a large number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, placing additional strain on those still operating. It said there was no evidence of a cyber attack, although the underlying cause had yet to be confirmed.
Steve Brehaut, managing director of Zenzero CI, said the scale of the disruption was unlike anything he had previously experienced.
‘I think this comes back to the reliance we all have on major global tech companies, which pretty much every business, and a lot of individuals, use,’ he said.
‘The scale of this is probably something I’ve never seen before, in the maybe 15 years or so we’ve used Microsoft or Office 365 for email.’
The States said that beyond the loss of email, it was relatively unscathed by the outage.
‘All our critical services have been running,’ said director of communications Joel de Woolfson. ‘Hospital services were as normal, the police were operating. Every team also has business continuity plans and we have workarounds too.’
He said that the States was an extensive user of Microsoft platforms, including email, Sharepoint and Teams. ‘But we’ve had no disruption of key public services.’
Mr Brehaut said the outage should serve as a reminder to businesses of the importance of having alternative systems in place should essential services fail.
‘There are options out there for continuity for email, and it all ties into businesses looking at their business continuity plans and core systems that are used that affect their ability to operate.
‘But equally, the caveat on that is a lot of these things come at a cost. So businesses may look at different solutions and feel that the cost prohibits potentially looking at other platforms to use.’
There were signs of recovery locally by late yesterday morning, with emails beginning to flow again by early afternoon.
Vega Technology managing director David Collings said many of his company’s clients had also been affected, particularly within the finance industry.
‘We operate pretty much exclusively in the financial services industry, and the Microsoft 365 platform is the de facto platform for that sector,’ he said.
‘You can only take Microsoft at their word, and they say that it’s not a malicious attack.’
Thankfully the greatest impact had been on communication between businesses and their clients, he said, rather than financial transactions themselves.
‘It just highlights how mission-critical these services are now, and that you need Microsoft and others who provide these sort of globally important systems to make sure that they’re robust.’
The disruption began on Thursday afternoon and spread across the world, with problems reported in 74 countries and territories.
Reports of Outlook problems peaked at nearly 140,000 globally, according to monitoring website Downdetector, although the true number of affected users is unknown.
The outage left people unable to send or receive emails, access calendars and use some Microsoft applications. Businesses, governments and public services were all affected.
In the UK, GP practices reported difficulties with online services, while government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States were also affected.
Microsoft said the additional strain on its infrastructure had not been caused by increased traffic, but by servers unexpectedly dropping out. Its initial attempts to restore systems were unsuccessful.
Microsoft then reported improvements in server stability after applying a software patch, although disruption continued in some areas as engineers worked to restore services.
Mr Collings said the incident raised wider questions about the importance of technology platforms to firms and governments.
‘They almost become too big to fail, don’t they? You can’t let these systems fail.’
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