Microsoft email outage: Here's the latest

Still talking about Microsoft, reporting its systems are slowly coming back online. That means you should soon get access to your Outlook email and other Microsoft programs. KTVU's James Torres live from Microsoft offices in Mountain View with what happened and how soon everything will return to normal. Good morning, James. And you'd hope it'd be soon, Pam, because we are starting to see some of these systems come back online, though it is all moving very slowly. Microsoft as early as very early this morning saying that it is seeing encouraging recovery process and you should start to be able to send and receive emails. Now, this outage started late yesterday morning and it's been a problem ever since, pretty much for almost an entire 24 hours. The company says its systems were We're so overloaded, but... Not because so many people were using it at the same time, but rather a number of their servers all of a sudden just stopped working. I'm not really sure why, but that outage affected Outlook email, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot, that's Microsoft's AI system. All of that disrupting businesses, schools, government in more than 70 countries, including here in the U.S. Systems rely on hyperscaled systems on the back end. Think thousands of servers that have to work in coordination. And sometimes whether it's a change or certain systems get overloaded, that could cause a cascading issue. And due to the scale, even something as simple as, you know, you might go into your kitchen and, you know, you might blow a fuse and you go turn, You know, hit the switch on and back off. Even something conceptually as simple as that at the scale that these platforms operate at takes some time. Microsoft immediately eased concerns of a greater threat, saying the outage was not the result of any sort of cyber attack. And they say engineers have been trying to get the servers back online for the last several hours. Microsoft also applied a 48-hour email timeout window. That means even if your email seems to be up and running, you may get some of those emails and messages delayed. As those servers work to catch up from a big backlog that they say has stocked up for those last 18 hours. We're live this morning in Mountain View. I'm James Torres, KTVU, Fox 2 News. Hi, James. Thank you. Time now, 6.05. Senate Democrats are facing a new leadership battle as they prepare to take control of Congress next year. Senator Chuck Schumer, now the minority leader, is being challenged over his plans to become the new majority leader. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen is running to replace Schumer and says the midterm election result showed that Change is needed. I am planning to run for the Senate Majority Leader. The call was really to reject the status quo. We're Democrats. We always have a difference of opinions, and everyone's going to express it, and we'll see what happens. There's a lot of time between now and then. I don't see a problem with it. Now, Senator Schumer posted on social media he already has the votes to continue serving as the Senate Democratic leader. However, progressive leaders like Senator Bernie Sanders and incoming Senator Abdul El-Sayed are backing Van Hollen and they're pushing for leadership change. And to talk more about that this morning, we're joined by political science professor David Schultz from Hamline University in Minnesota. Professor Schultz, always good to see you. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having me again. Yes. So what's your feel for what's happening in this battle to take over the Democratic majority in the Senate? What do you think? Well, what I think at this point is that this is a continuation of a battle that's been really simmering for at least during the election cycle, if not for the last couple of years, between the more progressive Democrats versus the more establishment Democrats. And a lot of the pushback against Schumer goes back to earlier, I think maybe last year, where they felt like Schumer, that as many of the progressives, wasn't fighting or taking on Trump hard enough. And so now they're saying we need new leadership. We need somebody who's going to be more aggressive. And they're looking for, basically, a change of guard at this point. And that's really what the battle is about. It's about tactics. I think it's less about ideology, and more it's about tactics and, let's say, persona, personality. Now, you look at strong progressive leaders like Bernie Sanders and others like that and Syed. How strong are they? Could they force that change on Chuck Schumer? It doesn't look like it at this point, because the other thing that Schumer has going for him at this point is the fact that the Democrats won. They took back control of the Senate. And it's a sense in which he's going to be viewed as what? A victor, as somebody who got him back in power. And it makes it hard to dislodge somebody who's perceived as a winner. So it's an incredible uphill battle at this point, I think, for the progressives. All right. Well, we will see. I did want to get your opinion on that. And I thank you for being with us. David Schultz, our political science professor of Hamline University, thank you for being with us on Mornings on 2. My pleasure. Thank you.