Warnings as hackers begin exploiting Microsoft outage

The Dutch pharmacists’ organisation KNMP has issued warnings that phishing emails are circulating as hackers attempt to exploit the ongoing Microsoft outage.

Microsoft software, which includes widely used email and communication tools like Outlook and Teams, has been down in much of the world since Thursday evening.

While the company says it has nothing to do with a cybersecurity breach, hackers are apparently attempting to take advantage of the situation by sending phishing emails that appear as messages from Microsoft offering to restore or update software.

The KNMP is urging people not to trust the emails. They are likely malicious attempts to gain control of customer data. Microsoft never sends such emails anyway, and communicates about its outages through its online channels.

Hundreds of millions of people use Microsoft apps daily for their work, making this potentially the “most severe technology outage in history”, a tech analyst told the BBC.

Dutch users of Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 were still impacted on Friday morning. By around 8.15am, Dutch outage tracker allestoringen.nl had logged almost 2,800 complaints about Outlook, nearly 700 about Microsoft 365 and just over 200 about Teams.

The situation was said to be improving by 1pm, with many people in the Netherlands able to access their emails again.

The University of Twente warned of disruption, and regional broadcasters Omroep Flevoland and RTV Utrecht said they were having trouble receiving email, according to ANP.

Microsoft said that the outage was caused by an “increased load” on infrastructure, with a number of servers unexpectedly offline, but no question of a cyberattack, the company wrote on social media.

With 430 million global users of Microsoft 365 software alone, the BBC analyst said the outage could well cause billions of dollars in losses.