PETALING JAYA: The National Cyber Security Agency (Nacsa) says that based on current information, the global Microsoft 365 outage is due to technical or infrastructure issues rather than a cyberattack.
In a notice on its Facebook page, the agency further adds that Microsoft has confirmed that there is no evidence of a cyberattack at this time.
Nacsa also advises all government agencies and National Critical Information Infrastructure (NCII) entities to check the status of affected services, ensure cybersecurity monitoring is not disrupted, and stay updated on new developments from Microsoft on their webpage.
Any disruptions that affect organisational operations should be reported via the available reporting channels, it adds, adding that the services most affected by the outage are those reliant on email.
An infographic from the agency further states that, based on the Microsoft Service Health Status, the outage was caused by a traffic management imbalance on Microsoft's infrastructure.
The outage, which reportedly began around 2am Malaysia time according to various reports, has disrupted businesses and governments worldwide, leaving users unable to access or perform various actions in Microsoft 365 services.
This includes Outlook, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Defender XDR worldwide, with Microsoft currently working to restore services. Meanwhile, Teams and SharePoint have already been restored, according to Nacsa.
Reports to the outage-tracking website Downdetector saw over 200,000 user reports of service issues across the affected Microsoft products.
As of publication, the Microsoft Service Health Status webpage currently lists Microsoft 365 for business, enterprise, and consumers under a "Service degradation" status with recovery efforts in progress.
"We’re continuing our recovery efforts to restore service health throughout the affected environment. This issue impacts Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web although you may also see issues in other Microsoft 365 services," the latest update on the page at around 12.30pm Malaysia time states.
