SINGAPORE, Nov 13 — Microsoft services have been hit with an outage since Thursday (November 12), resulting in many users across Singapore affected, particularly as they attempt to access email for work.

Randy Tan, a research analyst who uses his email to keep track of current affairs, told AsiaOne on Friday (November 13) that access to Outlook has been impacted.

While he said that his workflow hasn’t been affected that much as of yet, Tan expressed concern about what comes after the outage is resolved.

“I worry that the longer the delay, the larger the backlog of emails to look into and thus having to make more time later on to clear them,” he said.

Human resources manager Priscilla Lim was hit harder by the outage as her work relies heavily on email.

Not only has the disruption affected her ability to respond to ongoing situations, she also has to reroute communications to other platforms to keep work moving, she explained.

“It’s definitely inconvenient and frustrating, especially when email is such an integral part of our daily operations.”

Researcher Grace Ow said the situation was frustrating.

“While we do have some workarounds, it makes day-to-day tasks less efficient,” she said.

Online, many users in Singapore also shared their views on the outage, with some concerned over complications that this may bring.

“As someone working in IT, (I’m mentally exhausted) and don’t know what to expect when I come to work later,” a user on Reddit said.

Another bemoaned: “You mean we have to do our meetings face to face today?”

But others saw this as an opportunity to appreciate a slower Friday.

“Ah no wonder,” commented one. “I keep refreshing my Outlook but it’s not working, means it’s time to pang kang (go home) early.”

Joked another: “Take your own time, Microsoft IT guys, no job is worth sacrificing your peace and mental health. Come back and fix it next Monday when you are fresh and rested.”

According to outage tracker Downdetector, the number of outage reports in Singapore peaked at 567 at around 9.30am and has been declining since.

Microsoft acknowledged the outage at around 2.30am on Friday, where they stated that some Microsoft 365 services have been experiencing “elevated load” in multiple regions.

This prompted them to begin maintenance and repair operations, as well as review the situation and evaluate their options to redirect traffic to other infrastructure.

Since then, Microsoft has restarted the affected infrastructure after noting that a process on the impacted servers had been overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests.

They have seen positive results since then and began applying infrastructure capacity improvements to help support traffic in regions coming online, such as Singapore.

However, access to email is still limited as change is “not taking as expected”, Microsoft stated in an update just before 11am. — AsiaOne