The Microsoft Outlook outage that has caused chaos across the U.S. because its suite of email, calendar, video conferencing and cloud storage systems went completely offline, continues to cause problems. But Microsoft categorically denied the outage was the result of a malicious cyber attack, reports The Guardian, blaming the incident on “an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change."
This comes only weeks on the heels of the widespread disruption to online services in late October, caused not by cybercrime, but the AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in a programming language vital to about 70% of websites globally. Many businesses and web services voluntarily took their websites offline after the FBI's cyber division warned on October 21 that the vulnerabilities could allow malicious actors to remotely execute code in the programming language, PHP, which powers websites and web applications. A worldwide scramble to update the software and get back online ensued, and delivered a powerful reminder of the fragility of the worldwide web technology relied on by businesses, governments and individuals.
Much focus of late has been on defending this interconnected skein of technologies from malicious attacks, which are still frighteningly persistent. But, sometimes, just managing the massive infrastructure causes mistakes and disruptions.
“The underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve,” said executives from AI company Wiz, in an October 21 blog post. “Frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.”
Flora Hamilton, executive director of the Small Business Charter in the U.K., told BBC News that the Microsoft outage was a "stark reminder" of how much firms "rely on digital systems" — like Microsoft Outlook — "to keep their operations running."
The outage that started around 1pm ET on November 12 looked to be resolving on November 13, as Outlook started to resume normal operations, but local leaders from across the country, including in Miami, Maryland and Los Angeles, warned residents that certain staff or services remained unavailable.
The Guardian said that Workhorse Group, an industrial manufacturer, rescheduled its Q3 earnings call scheduled for the afternoon of November 12, because of the outage.
In a social media post, Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said late on November 12 that “there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”.
The next morning, Microsoft announced “improvements in service availability” but warned that “some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as a recovery continues.”
