Microsoft outage hits users worldwide: What went wrong, why is cyberattack ruled out? - explainer

Microsoft experienced one of its biggest global outages on Thursday, with thousands of clients worldwide reporting that they couldn't connect to services such as Outlook, Microsoft 365, and Teams.While the company hasn't issued a final resolution, and the problem reached Asia-Pacific on Friday, most experts ruled out the possibility that the incident was the result of a cyberattack.According to official Microsoft statements, the company was investigating a possible internal error that prompted the accounts to be disconnected from the North American servers, and a domino-like effect after those accounts were moved to other servers around the world.According to initial estimates, the surge in traffic to those servers caused delays and further outages, and some companies had to send employees home early because of the persistent connection issue.In technical terms, the first assessment indicates that some of its servers failed a health check, prompting the connection disruption and the redistribution of users to servers in other parts of the world.Experts indicate that because the issue was not a cyberattack, Microsoft will likely have to identify the exact server that failed the health check and triggered the massive outage.Why wasn't it a cyberattack against Microsoft?While it won't be possible to establish the real incident until Microsoft issues a public status report and completes an internal investigation, three facts push the cyberattack theory…