Portugal government, schools and health services hit by global Microsoft outage

Microsoft has been experiencing service outages since Thursday afternoon. Several Microsoft 365 services have gone down, affecting Outlook, the Teams videoconferencing app, the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant, among others.In Portugal, the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS) have confirmed that the global failure at Microsoft is affecting the bodies under the Ministry of Health and said it is working to restore services as soon as possible.In comments to Lusa, an SPMS source said that the services are monitoring the situation and "working in coordination with Microsoft, with a view to restoring the affected services as quickly as possible", without specifying which areas are affected.Several ministers in the Portuguese government reportedly also do not have access to email, reports SIC Notícias (source in Portuguese).A government source told the television station that there is an internal IT network that is not being affected by the outage and that has made it possible to keep the executive's work going.However, ministers and their offices are using messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal to communicate.The same source assured the broadcaster that, despite the disruption, the functioning of the government has not been compromised and that government activity is continuing.In a statement (source in Portuguese), the government's secretary-general also confirmed that since Thursday there have been "impacts on the various IT tools that…