Microsoft services begin recovering after global outage

Microsoft started to see improvements in North America early Friday morning, meaning we were able to access our emails again. The outages impacted hundreds of millions of users across the world, making this now one of the longest outages in Microsoft's history. This is also the second time this year we saw this type of disruption from the tech giant. Microsoft Outlook and Teams are widely used in offices across the world. Microsoft says this is not related to some sort of malicious intent like a cyber attack, but it did reach more than 70 countries. We did see people online joking about how they were able to take a break from their job, but at the end of the day, this did cause some stress for a lot of government employees specifically. We heard cases of, for instance, a trial having to be put on pause. The National Pharmacists Association also warned delays in people being able to pick up their prescription. As well as impacting police departments and AI companies, Microsoft is relating this to what they're calling an elevated load, meaning there was not some sort of increase in traffic, but rather servers unexpectedly started going unavailable very quickly, straining the entire infrastructure. Analysts say this puts into question just how much do we have to rely on one company's technology products and the need to diversify services.