Microsoft says service being restored on 2nd day of worldwide outage

First, other news. Microsoft is still dealing with a widespread outage this morning. The company was hoping that it would be resolved by now, but it's not. Users around the world, business, government, and personal alike still can't log in to their email and other online tools. CBC's Julia Chapman joins me now. Julia, we just heard from Microsoft about, what, half an hour ago? What are they saying about a potential fix? Well, Mark, services are slowly being restored, particularly in the Asia-Pacific area. The latest statement from Microsoft says, we've made additional progress toward recovery with actions now completed across... Portions of affected infrastructure and traffic being gradually restored. We're seeing improvements, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue. And indeed, there are still disruptions being reported. They do vary. Some people are reporting absolutely no issues at all in other areas. Some people can't send or receive emails. Others have no problems with their email, but can't access Teams, the virtual meeting service. Thank Excuse me. There are also disruptions to Copilot the Microsoft AI assistant. This all started at 1 p.m. Eastern time or around then yesterday. It has taken quite a while for Microsoft to get everything back up and running again. And the impact has been really wide ranging. At least 74 countries affected. And that has hit services, you. including health care here in the UK, where patient records haven't been able to be shared between different medical services. The Japanese government has been expressing concern about outages they've got. The Australian spy agency, some airlines as well, unable to communicate with their customers. So the disruption has been incredibly wide-ranging. And what do we know about the cause of all this, Julia? Well, early on, Microsoft ruled out any kind of cyber attack, saying that they had no indication that there was malicious activity. It's thought that this was a server failure. And originally, Microsoft said that there was a... elevated load that was to blame. They went on to revise that explanation saying that some servers became unexpectedly unavailable. But initial attempts to repair their systems didn't go as planned. They said that they weren't fixed as expected. Excuse me, it has taken some time to bring those services online and we are still seeing outages in many parts of the world. Julia Chapman, thank you so much. You're welcome.