Microsoft has been experiencing service outages since Thursday afternoon. Several Microsoft 365 services went down, affecting Outlook, the Teams videoconferencing app, the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant and others. The company reported improvements in the affected services early on Friday afternoon, but the global failure has still not been fully resolved.
In Portugal, the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health (SPMS) confirmed that the global Microsoft outage was affecting entities under the Ministry of Health and said it was working to restore services as soon as possible.
In comments to Lusa, an SPMS source said that services were monitoring the situation and “working in coordination with Microsoft, with a view to restoring the affected services as quickly as possible”, but without specifying the exact areas affected.
Several ministers in the Portuguese Government also lost access to their email, SIC Notícias reported (source in Portuguese) this morning.
A government source told the TV channel that there is an internal IT network that was not affected by the outage and has allowed the executive to continue working.
However, ministers and their offices were 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 had not been compromised and that government activity was continuing.
In a statement (source in Portuguese), the secretary-general’s office of the Government also confirmed that since Thursday there had been “impacts on the various IT tools that support the daily activity of the Government and Public Administration” due to constraints affecting the tools on the Microsoft 365 platform.
Despite this, “the normal functioning of all these entities is assured, namely through the use of secure alternative means”, the secretary-general’s office of the Government added.
“The Secretariat-General of the Government (SGGOV) remains in continuous contact with Microsoft, and it has been confirmed that the company’s technical teams are working on restoring services across Europe, and that priority will be given to Public Administration services”, the statement also said.
Schools have also encountered problems because of the widespread failure of Microsoft’s services.
The president of the Association of Principals of School Clusters and Public Schools, Filinto Lima, explained in comments to Renascença (source in Portuguese) that the outage was affecting communication between parents, teachers and pupils.
“They cannot access institutional emails or the Teams platform. That is where teachers post homework and some assignments. We hope this situation will be resolved”, he said.
Microsoft has been issuing regular updates on the situation. In an update at 12h10, the company said it was already seeing “encouraging progress in recovery”.
In a statement on X, the tech giant reported that “email delivery performance was improving across a growing portion of the affected Microsoft 356 infrastructure”, but warned that some users might still experience “intermittent issues as recovery actions continue”.
By 14h17, the company confirmed that the measures taken to resolve the problem were finally having an effect and that users were gradually regaining access to their emails.
However, the service is still not 100% operational in all countries. Microsoft again warned that some users may still experience connection issues or delays in email delivery while recovery continues.
The problem appears to be linked to a configuration update that led to overloading and the shutdown of some servers, Microsoft indicated.
The company ruled out the possibility that the failure was due to any malicious activity, saying it had no evidence that the worldwide service outage was caused by a cyberattack.