A multihour outage of Microsoft’s office software Outlook, beginning on Friday morning, severely disrupted work in Hong Kong’s financial sector, according to staff members at several of the city’s investment banks.
Some bankers from Goldman Sachs and Nomura said their work had been interrupted, the South China Morning Post learned. Many in Central, Hong Kong’s main financial district, had to work offline after the email service went down.
“We haven’t been able to send or receive emails since the early hours of this morning, and the problem is still ongoing,” a Nomura employee told the SCMP at 11.10am.
An employee at Goldman Sachs said the bank’s Hong Kong office had to use an alternative postbox system to access emails and continue business operations.
“Some people were in [a] panic,” said an employee at another major US investment bank, who declined to be named. Microsoft services had been unavailable since the early hours of Friday.
Acknowledging the service outage, DBS Bank said in a statement that clients should expect delayed email responses and could use mobile banking platforms to view transaction notifications.
Microsoft confirmed that service connectivity for Microsoft 365, which includes Outlook, was disrupted for users in various regions, including the US, Japan and Singapore.
The prolonged pause of email systems and other communication platforms has had far-reaching effects, with personnel from sectors like healthcare, air travel and law enforcement reporting challenges to regular workflow without the full functionality of Microsoft’s suite of programs.
Among numerous global service interruptions, rail networks issued notices to passengers indicating they would not receive email notifications about their trips, and patients in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service were reportedly warned about delays in receiving their prescriptions.
An official account dedicated to providing updates on Microsoft 365 service incidents said in a series of social media posts the “elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure”.
The account did not specify the impact on Hong Kong, and the most recent post in the message chain indicated “incremental improvement” had been observed. Microsoft did not immediately respond to an emailed inquiry from the SCMP.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, roughly 130,000 users worldwide reported service irregularities at the peak of the outages on Friday morning. In Hong Kong, Downdetector continued to receive hundreds of reports each hour about Outlook issues after a daily high around 9am.
Hongkongers took to social media to share their connectivity problems. One user said: “My boss arrived at the office in the morning and asked why our company IT hadn’t sent out an email notification to inform [us about] the outage, only to be told IT can’t use email either.”
Another user wrote: “I realised Microsoft was down when I sat here wondering why it was so quiet today – not a single email.”
Outlook service connectivity had yet to resume fully by 4pm.
Francis Fong Po-kiu, honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, noted that some servers had gradually recovered and services in some regions were improving.
“Users should not frequently retry or reset their accounts, but should use phones or other communication tools to stay in touch,” Fong said, advising them to “save important emails and documents until services are fully restored”. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
