Portugal government, schools and health services hit by global Microsoft outage

Microsoft has been experiencing service outages since Thursday afternoon. Several Microsoft 365 services have gone down, affecting Outlook, the Teams videoconferencing app, the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant, among others. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT In Portugal, the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS) have confirmed that the global failure at Microsoft is affecting the bodies under the Ministry of Health and said it is working to restore services as soon as possible. In comments to Lusa, an SPMS source said that the services are monitoring the situation and "working in coordination with Microsoft, with a view to restoring the affected services as quickly as possible", without specifying which areas are affected. Several ministers in the Portuguese government reportedly also do not have access to email, reports SIC Notícias (source in Portuguese). A government source told the television station that there is an internal IT network that is not being affected by the outage and that has made it possible to keep the executive's work going. However, ministers and their offices are using messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal to communicate. The same source assured the broadcaster that, despite the disruption, the functioning of the government has not been compromised and that government activity is continuing. In a statement (source in Portuguese), the government's secretary-general also confirmed that since Thursday there have been "impacts on the various IT tools that support the daily activity of the Government and the Public Administration" because of problems affecting tools on the Microsoft 365 platform. Despite this, "the normal functioning of all these bodies is guaranteed, in particular through the use of secure alternative means", the secretary-general of the government stressed. "The Secretariat-General of the Government (SGGOV) remains in continuous contact with Microsoft, and it has been confirmed that the company's technical teams are working to restore services across Europe, and that priority will be given to Public Administration services," the same note adds. Schools are also already experiencing problems because of the widespread failure of Microsoft services. The president of the Association of Directors of Grouped and Public Schools, Filinto Lima, explained in comments to Renascença (source in Portuguese) that the failure is affecting communication between parents, teachers and pupils. "They cannot access institutional emails or the Teams platform. That is where teachers post homework and some assignments. We hope this situation will be resolved," he said. Microsoft has been issuing regular updates on the situation. In an update at 12:10, the company said it was already seeing "encouraging progress in the recovery". In a statement on X, the tech giant reported that "email delivery performance was improving across a growing portion of the affected Microsoft 356 infrastructure", but warned that some users may still have "intermittent issues as recovery actions continue". So far, the problem appears to be related to a configuration update that is thought to have caused overload and the shutdown of some servers, Microsoft said. The company has ruled out the possibility that the failure is due to any malicious activity, saying it has no evidence that the worldwide service outage originated in a cyberattack. For now, Microsoft is not committing to a timeframe for restoring the infrastructure.