'One of the biggest outages ever': Disruption to Microsoft services enters second day

Joining us is our tech editor, Peter O'Brien. Hello to you, Peter. I was looking at my email. At first, I thought it was just me forgetting my password or something. But, you know, there are countless people affected. Tell us what happened. So as you said, people are not getting into work this morning across Europe. They're arriving and they're not able to access their email. That's the big one that's really affecting people. They're not able to communicate with each other. But it's the duration of this. This is going to go down in history as one of the biggest international web services outages. Yeah, it's already more than half a day now, right? It is a huge outage and it's affecting people all around the world. As you said there, that number of countries, well it's actually more because some of them we just don't have data on. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of people probably affected now, if not more. more. And The technical side of it is that it appears to have been a load of servers that went down. It seems to have been an internal error, a technical error, rather than a cyber attack as you say. At least that's what Microsoft is saying. Thank you for saying. And this therefore affected something called Exchange Online, which is Microsoft's online messaging service, which is used in Microsoft 365 apps. So that could be Teams, that could be Outlook, or even Copilot, their AI chatbot. So they've published these various updates, but it doesn't seem like any of the patches have worked, apart from maybe the latest one. I personally still can't get into my email. So I think... With any of these things, it's going to take a while for stuff to come online, even if this new fix has worked. You talked about this being perhaps one of the biggest global outages in history. We'll still have to see how things stand and when they'll be resolved. Where do things stand right now? What's Microsoft doing to try to resolve this? We can only speculate as to what actually the cause was. All I know is they have published that update saying there have been positive results for For server stability after applying an Upstream authentication slash routing configuration component patch to a portion of their infrastructure. So even, you know, you might think as tech correspondents, I'll be able to tell you exactly what that means. No, they use a lot of jargon in these updates. It sounds like the positive side is we're trying to resolve it. Oh, yeah. But we haven't done it yet. They're desperate to resolve it. This could cost them billions. I mean, this is going to be another hit to the tech. I mean, it's how people communicate with each other in offices. That's the crucial thing to remember here is, I think it's about eight in 10 offices worldwide are reliant on Microsoft. So people are coming in to clinics, to schools, to their airline operator where they work. Some are reacting saying, great, day off, no work to do. Others are panicking because maybe they've got deals to close. The financial services sector has been hitting the phones rather than emailing each other now. So it's hard to understate the impact worldwide of this. Yeah, and a global outage means no day off for Peter O'Brien, does it? No day off for me. All right. Thank you very much, Peter O'Brien, from our tech desk.