Technology
A global outage of Microsoft 365 has now stretched more than 12 hours, with Outlook, OneDrive and Copilot unavailable to users throughout Friday.
The disruption has been felt across New Zealand, affecting major government agencies, schools, businesses, health services, property settlements and court appearances.
Microsoft's public status page was still showing a service degradation this evening, saying users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services. Its separate Azure cloud status page was not listing a related incident.
Reports of problems rose sharply from about 6.30am New Zealand time. Microsoft first said it was investigating mailbox access issues in the Americas, then confirmed the problem could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region. It said a portion of its infrastructure was under "elevated load across multiple regions".
Organisations have been finding workarounds. Health NZ has said there has been minimal disruption to patient services, with staff using phones, fax machines and printed forms. 1News reported some services were being switched to more manual systems, and that people were still unable to connect to Outlook, Teams and Copilot this afternoon. Immigration visa processing was paused while systems were down. Schools have reported delayed access to email and online resources. Some property settlements have had to be finished by phone, and court work that usually goes by email has been slowed.
Microsoft has tried several fixes, including pausing new deployments, shifting traffic off affected servers, and restarting machines. Earlier on Friday it said those actions had "not provided the anticipated relief". At 1.06pm, Microsoft 365 Status said the servers it had returned to service "can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic". At 4.13pm it said changes meant to improve serviceability were "not taking as expected".
At 6.01pm, Microsoft 365 Status said it was working on several streams of work to reduce the impact, deal with its current blocker, and return parts of its infrastructure to a healthy state. A later incident update said engineers were trying to sync machines that were "stuck in a bad state", and that this was preventing changes from syncing as expected.
Microsoft has said there is no indication the outage was caused by malicious or cyber activity. It has not given a time for a full recovery.