Microsoft confirms ‘no evidence of malicious activity’ in widespread outage of Outlook

Microsoft said on Friday there is “no evidence of malicious activity” related to the global disruption of its Outlook email service and other Office 365 apps.“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” the technology company said at 6:11 a.m. “We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.”The reason behind the widespread outage remains unclear, but its effects on Microsoft’s services were catastrophic. At one point on Thursday, more than 130,000 Outlook users reported problems with accessing the online portal. The issue affected various companies, governments, schools, and millions of users who use Microsoft’s tools, such as Teams and OneDrive.Microsoft has been trying to mitigate the problem since midday Thursday, but it only began to see improvements early Friday morning. The company previously said efforts to restore its infrastructure were “not taking as expected,” later adding that “these actions aren’t resulting in sustained recovery.”In one of its latest updates, Microsoft said it was “seeing encouraging recovery progress” but warned that “users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue.”Downdetector reported around 15,000 Outlook problems around 6 a.m. Friday morning, significantly down from the Thursday afternoon peak.Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, confirmed there was no indication that the outage was the “result of malicious or cyber activity” in a comment under one of Microsoft 365 Status’s X posts overnight.NVIDIA’S JENSEN HUANG RESIGNS AFTER CONFESSING TO AFFAIR WITH SUSPECTED CHINESE SPYWhile progress was being made on the fixes, many different institutions reported experiencing problems. For instance, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado said it couldn’t process online bond payments while Outlook was down. And in the Philippines, the Supreme Court said its legal work was delayed due to the outage.The outage disrupted Microsoft’s apps in at least 74 countries, from Asia to North America, within an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector. Service continues to improve.