Microsoft 365 Outage Prompts Ministry of Science and ICT to Form Emergency Response Team ... Service Restored

[Financial News] A disruption to Microsoft (MS)'s business software is entering its second day. Although the outage has begun to ease, its effects, including workplace disruptions, are continuing.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said on the 14th that it had formed an emergency response team with Microsoft Korea and would do its utmost to ensure the stable provision of digital services in South Korea, including by continuously monitoring service restoration and difficulties faced by domestic users.
The ministry said it would launch a full-scale response, including monitoring service restoration and the extent of the damage, to minimize inconvenience for users in South Korea.


On the 13th, services including Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 experienced an outage, disrupting the sending and receiving of email at some companies in South Korea.
MS explained that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack or an issue related to artificial intelligence (AI), but by a problem that had arisen during an earlier network capacity upgrade, remained latent, and surfaced after recent network changes.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said it was checking the status of service restoration and reports of inconvenience and damage among domestic users through Microsoft Korea. It also asked major platform operators in South Korea to conduct their own system checks to help prevent outages.
The Microsoft 365 outage has entered a recovery phase. After it was reported on the 12th (local time), MS announced late in the afternoon on the 13th (local time), “Microsoft 365 consumer services have been fully restored, while business services are continuing to recover.”
MS said the incident, which affected Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and even the AI assistant Microsoft Copilot, was improving, with email processing queues nearing normal levels.
In South Korea, the weekend reportedly helped people avoid major work-related disruptions.
By contrast, major foreign media outlets report that problems are still being reported overseas. According to The Associated Press (AP), Australia's ABC News, and The Guardian, users in some parts of Europe were unable to access their inboxes or send and receive emails, while email access disruptions continued at several government ministries in Norway.
The outage spread to 74 countries. In the United States, nearly 130,000 reports of problems accessing Microsoft Outlook were filed with the outage-monitoring site Downdetector at one point.
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) activated emergency contingency measures, using alternative information technology (IT) systems and paper records to prepare for workplace disruptions.
The impact was not limited to email. Microsoft Teams features connected to Exchange Online, including calendar management and meeting scheduling, were also disrupted, as was Microsoft Copilot's work-data search function. Some work tools, including Planner and To Do, also experienced errors.
MS has at least 450 million paid business subscriptions to Microsoft 365, highlighting the risk that an outage at a single cloud provider could disrupt operations across businesses and public institutions worldwide.

[email protected] Lee Gu-sun Reporter