NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — A widespread Microsoft outage Thursday disrupted businesses across the country, leaving users unable to access critical workplace tools — including email, video conferencing, and some cybersecurity systems.
The disruption also hit Nashville, affecting local businesses, Metro departments, and Fisk University.
The outage began shortly after noon Thursday, disrupting Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot. At its peak, more than 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook.
Ken Mayer, Assistant Professor at Lipscomb University's School of Computing, says the disruption was also being felt by his students, some of whom reached out about problems at their workplaces.
"All of that is stuff within that Microsoft kind of like family that's having issues today," Mayer said.
Mayer teaches students studying cybersecurity, information technology, computer science, and software engineering.
He says businesses rely on these systems for everything from communicating with customers to generating sales.
"Corporations, you know, they depend on that for, you know, for communicating with customers; they get sales, so revenue is going to take a small hit," Mayer said.
The outage also affected some of Microsoft's security tools, raising questions about whether the disruption could have been the result of a cyberattack.
However, Mayer says there was no indication that was the case.
"I kind of been getting the impression reading online this may have just been a hardware and software issue. There's been no indication this has been a hack at all," he said.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to problems involving server health checks and unresponsive servers. The company said it was restarting affected servers as it worked to restore services.
Mayer says the outage highlights how much businesses have come to depend on cloud-based technology.
Moving applications and information away from individual computers and onto cloud platforms has created convenience for IT departments and businesses. But it can also leave organizations vulnerable when a major service experiences a disruption.
"You can expect that as we are moving this stuff off computers and we're moving it up to the cloud, we're starting to see just a lot of convenience for IT. But now this is coming back to kind of bite us," Mayer said.
He also says the disruption could have financial consequences for Microsoft and the businesses that rely on its services.
"Microsoft, on average, is a little over $100 billion in revenue on just this product, so they're probably going to start having some lawsuits, people losing revenue. So there, there's definitely going to need to be some accountability," Mayer said.
Microsoft says it is gradually restoring affected services and monitoring their stability.
Earlier, the company said problems with the systems responsible for checking server health may have contributed to the outage. Microsoft later said some servers had become unresponsive, prompting the company to restart them.
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