Capital Region expert discusses worldwide Microsoft outage

Company says Microsoft outage was caused by technical issue.

The Details

ALBANY, N.Y. (WNYT)- Many email users regained service after a major Microsoft outage disrupted work and exposed how much businesses depend on large cloud providers on Thursday, Nov. 12.

Microsoft said it addressed the issue that caused outages to Outlook, Teams and Copilot across America and in 74 countries.

During an interview with NewsChannel 13, Randy Rose, vice president of security operations and intelligence at the Center for Internet Security (CIS), said the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity breach.

“Microsoft has not put out the official root cause, but I think this really speaks to the complexity of cloud services,” Randy Rose said.

“As far as we can tell, it was a result of a network change at this point,” Rose said. “So system administrators make changes to back-end services all the time. Sometimes those things go as planned and sometimes they don’t. They’re just, you know, these are complex systems and just the way that they interact sometimes a new, especially if it’s an untested patch can have ramifications, third order effects and in this case, global outages.”

What can users do?

Rose said the trouble appeared to start in Microsoft Exchange and spread through connected Microsoft 365 services, disrupting email and other tools. He said CIS was also affected but used a secondary provider so it could keep sending cyber event notifications to customers.

Rose said the outage does not appear to have put individual accounts at risk, but he warned that criminals may still try phishing campaigns and set up malicious domains tied to fake fixes or patches. He said users should rely on Microsoft’s official website and other trusted sources such as CIS and avoid clicking on unexpected email messages.