Microsoft has been experiencing service outages since Thursday afternoon. Several Microsoft 365 services went down, affecting Outlook, the Teams videoconferencing app, the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant, among others. The company confirmed improvements in the affected services at the start of Friday afternoon, but the global failure has still not been fully resolved.
In Portugal, the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS) confirmed that the global failure at Microsoft was affecting entities under the Ministry of Health and said it was working to restore services as soon as possible.
Speaking to Lusa, a source at SPMS said that services were monitoring the situation and "working in coordination with Microsoft, with a view to restoring the affected services as quickly as possible", but without specifying the exact areas affected.
Several Portuguese government ministers also lost access to email, SIC Notícias reported (source in Portuguese) this morning.
A government source told the TV channel that there is an internal IT network that was not affected by the outage and that has made it possible to ensure the work of the executive.
However, ministers and their offices were 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 was not compromised and that government activity was continuing.
In a statement (source in Portuguese), the government’s secretariat general also confirmed that since Thursday there had been "impacts on the various IT tools that support the daily activity of the government and the public administration", due to constraints affecting the tools on the Microsoft 365 platform.
Despite this, "the normal functioning of all these entities is ensured, namely through the use of secure alternative means", the government’s secretariat general stressed.
"The Government Secretariat General (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 reads.
Schools have also experienced problems because of the general failure of Microsoft services.
The president of the Association of Directors of Public School Clusters and Schools, Filinto Lima, explained in comments to Renascença (source in Portuguese) that the failure was affecting communication between parents, teachers and pupils.
"They cannot access institutional emails or the Teams platform. That is where teachers upload homework and some assignments. We hope this situation will be resolved", he said.
Microsoft has been issuing regular status updates. In an update at 12.10 p.m., 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 experience "intermittent issues as recovery actions continue".
View the post on X
— https://x.com/i/status/2121213845490336163
By 2.17 p.m., the company confirmed that the measures taken to resolve the problem were finally having an effect and that users were gradually regaining access to their emails.
However, the service is still not 100% operational in all countries. Microsoft again warned that some users may still encounter connection problems or delays in email delivery while recovery continues.
The problem appears to be related to a configuration update that overloaded and deactivated some servers, Microsoft indicated.
The company ruled out the possibility that the failure was due to any malicious activity, saying it had no evidence that the worldwide service outage originated in a cyberattack.
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