Microsoft apologizes for global outage as services come back online

A major outage at Microsoft disrupted workers across the globe. It's just been really frustrating and challenging to be able to maintain contact with our colleagues. It's just made it really difficult to access negotiating documents. It started Thursday, cutting off access to the company's flagship services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot. Causing missed emails and meetings, some websites couldn't be updated. It's more been the back office functions, so things that should have been done now have been delayed. It's not clear exactly how many people were affected, though Microsoft has 450 million paid subscribers worldwide. In a statement on X, the company wrote, there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity. Pointing instead to an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade. A configuration update that goes awry can actually affect the lives of millions and millions of people around the world in a significant way. In Canada, some universities experienced issues. Still, classes were running as scheduled. Some hospitals had trouble sending and receiving emails, though many said patient care was unaffected. And Via Rail said passengers may not be able to receive communications about their trips. The outage highlights the risk of concentration in technology. We put our offices, our data and our ability to work into the hands of just one single provider and we outsource everything into the cloud. Experts say governments and businesses should diversify providers so that the IT ecosystem becomes more resilient. If we do not switch to more redundancy in the field of cybersecurity and cloud computing, This might occur in the future again. Microsoft says it's deeply sorry for the disruption and that it has addressed the underlying issue. Nisha Patel, CBC News, Toronto.