NPR’s A Martínez speaks with WIRED’s Andrew Couts about a widespread outage of Microsoft products that has disrupted the lives and work of thousands of people.
Transcription
MICHEL MARTIN, PRESENTER:
Microsoft says it is making progress this morning on restoring access after a widespread outage of its products affected customers around the world, including here at NPR. Microsoft says it has 430 million users of its Microsoft 365 services. And for many hours starting yesterday, users of its email program, Outlook, were unable to send or receive emails. So let’s ask Andrew Couts about this. He has been covering the outage as director of security and investigations at news outlet WIRED. Andrew, good morning. Thanks for keeping us updated here.
ANDREW COUTS: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So what’s the latest status on these Microsoft outages?
COUTS: Around 7 a.m. ET, services in Europe and North America began to come back online. We are seeing some stability in those services. So you’ll probably start seeing emails arriving in your inbox and accessing your files and other services in Microsoft 365.
MARTIN: Okay. So in an update posted to its website this morning, Microsoft said, “we have no evidence of malicious activity,” in quotes. So what could be the culprit?
COUTS: You know, it’s very difficult to know right now. It’s good to know that they don’t think it’s a cyber attack. But until we have a post-mortem of the company, we really won’t know exactly what could happen. It could be misconfigured files or other code errors. It could be anything in a complex system like Microsoft services. You know, we really have to wait and see.
MARTIN: How do you understand what the impact of this disruption has been on businesses, governments and individuals?
COUTS: Well, it really has been enormously disturbing. I mean, countless companies around the world, many local governments and national governments are experiencing problems. You know, airlines are having to divert customers to alternative communication methods. We’ve even seen jails in the United States unable to release people on bail because their email systems are down. So it’s really impactful in a lot of different ways.
MARTIN: Yes. What’s wrong with you? If you don’t mind me asking.
COUTS: Well, fortunately, WIRED is on a different type of system. So we don’t have to worry too much about that, although I’m sure there are a lot of emails I’m not getting…
MARTIN: (Laughter).
COUTS: …Because external parties cannot contact each other through their own systems.
MARTIN: That’s true. You don’t know what you’re missing unless… until you’re wrong… until someone gets mad…
COUTS: Yes.
MARTIN: …To you, right? Yeah.
COUTS: Indeed. Indeed. I think a lot of people were hoping that today, you know, a snow day caused by technology they wouldn’t have to work. But unfortunately, for them, I think it’s starting to come back online. I think we will see services restored here in the next few hours if all goes well.
MARTIN: So how does this disruption compare to recent ones?
COUTS: It’s really unprecedented in terms of duration and scale. You know, many services have been down. Last year, we saw a widespread outage to Amazon Web Services that was truly disruptive. In 2024, we saw a couple of outages and system crashes with Windows that affected Microsoft and Windows users. So, but in terms of 365, we haven’t really seen anything like this and certainly not something on this scale.
MARTIN: There’s only a couple of seconds left here. But do you think we’ll ever really know why this happened? Does Microsoft have a good track record of being honest about things like this?
COUTS: Yes. They’re going to be honest, to the extent that they’re able to figure out exactly what went wrong. I don’t think we’ll see them trying to hide that, nothing. You know, a lot of people have been coming up with conspiracy theories about what could have happened, whether it was AI code. But we should know exactly what happened, or more or less, soon.
MARTIN: That’s Andrew Couts, WIRED’s director of security and investigations. Andrew, thank you very much.
COUTS: Thank you.
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