Microsoft says services slowly being restored after widespread outages | Hanomansing Live

Reports of widespread outages involving Microsoft continue to plague a lot of users this hour. Sarah has been following this story for us. And first of all, do we know what's behind this, what caused it? We don't know, and Microsoft does not know either, and they have been trying to figure this out now for more than eight hours. I will say we just have an update now on the Microsoft health status of their servers, and what they are saying, and this may be important. If you are somebody using these services, note this. They say that if you are interacting with Exchange Online, then you are potentially going to be impacted. Now, Exchange Online, you're talking about business emails, calendar, contacts. But if you are not interacting, if you're using services that do not interact with Exchange Online, then... You you think should be functioning fine. The programs, it's a very long list of potentially affected programs. I'm not going to get into all of them, but it really explains why we've been hearing so much in terms of frustrations from so many people. And Microsoft. Probably is really the only entity that has a real handle on just how widespread this is. And what they have said is that this could be potentially impacting multiple regions. They have used the words in their social media updates throughout the Americas. They are not indicating, you know, that they have had any real success, other than they at one point had restored a number of services, servers, pardon me, and then found out that, in fact, the ones that they had thought they had restored, in fact, were still vulnerable. And so they are limiting traffic at this point to those servers in order to try and answer your question, Ian, which is what exactly has caused this problem? It's fascinating to me that they don't aren't able to do the analytics at this point after all these hours to figure that out. This is one of those things you don't realize how much you. Rely on technology until it fails you. So there are people who use this for video conferences, who use it, of course, for email, who are working on documents on Microsoft 365, plans that they would have had this evening that all of a sudden they can't carry out with. And you asked to hear from some viewers and they responded. Yeah, we did. And I'll just say also, in terms of how many people have been affected by this, there are those who for hours did not know they were being affected because they didn't know. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know what emails you're not receiving. But yes, I mean, we put it out to viewers. We got quite a few responses. So let me just read a few of them, starting with David, who's in Fredericton. And I'm sorry, last hour I got cut off there because I ran out of time. So David writes, the Microsoft outage affects my partner's HVAC. And my work for a company in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Linda in Vancouver writes, yes, I was affected in Vancouver working on an animated movie for Disney, which relies on Teams and Outlook with a big deadline tomorrow. Teams chats worked, thank goodness, but Calendar did not, so I missed meetings. Outlook still not working, and that's just at last hour. And then Deirdre in Charlottetown writes, this afternoon I couldn't log on to Outlook. Frustrating. Used to know trouble was widespread and not my MacBook malfunctioning. Thanks for continuing to update the sitch. Deirdre, you're welcome. Continuing to watch those updates. They do continue to come, and this problem is still. Being resolved, but not yet. I'm a last minute guy. Thank goodness I didn't have software to deal with when I was in university because if a paper was due tomorrow, I'd be working on it. There's a lot of students at universities right now who are affected across Canada. Yeah, so you will stay on this. We are live for the next 45 minutes or so. So absolutely, as soon as you hear something, let me know. And when you hear something, let us know. We're also continuing to be interested in the impact this outage is having on you. Email us, ask Hanno. At cbc.ca.