00:00Yes, well Chloe, they say that Friday the 13th is unlucky for some. Definitely been
00:05unlucky for Microsoft and it's thousands of users here in Kent who have been
00:09affected by this global outage which has brought down emails, Microsoft Teams,
00:15Outlook and Microsoft 365. Now this has been caused by connectivity problems,
00:20that's what Microsoft just said, including affecting the University of Kent where I am now.
00:26Their emails were down all morning, some slowly starting to triple through in the afternoon.
00:31But it's been at the top of everyone's lips today. We had the deputy leader of Kent County Council and
00:37the leader of Bedway Council on the politics show this morning. They were telling me that it's
00:41affected them, both of their councils, in fact all councils across Kent, their emails have been
00:47brought down by this. So while we've not seen a steady stream of emails today, what we have seen
00:52is a steady stream of posts online by affected organisations trying to notify people who've
00:58probably been trying to get in touch with them via email. So we can see posts from
01:02Kent Fire and Rescue Service. They said their home fire safety visit referrals have been
01:07affected, encouraging people to ring them rather than email. NHS foundations across the
01:13county have been affected. They said it's impacted patient inquiries and referrals but
01:18importantly that no clinical procedures or appointments would be affected. They'd continue
01:23as normal. Kent Police were saying that their online submission forms could be impacted by it.
01:28So they were saying that the public needed to ring 101 if they were having an issue that wasn't
01:33an emergency but was still time critical. It's impacted schools. Even estate agents have been
01:40saying that people trying to move house today would be impacted. So it's really had wide ranging
01:46effects across the county. And what's Microsoft said about it?
01:53Yeah so Microsoft has ruled out a cyber attack that was an initial concern given the volume of
01:58cyber attacks we faced in Europe in recent months. They've said it's due to an elevated load on their
02:04infrastructure which means servers are handling a higher volume of stress than normal and so a large
02:10number of these servers became unexpectedly unavailable. They said they tried a number of solutions and did
02:15start seeing some encouraging recovery progress off their words this early this afternoon and that
02:21they're focused on addressing remaining areas of disruption but one that people would still face
02:25some intermittent issues as recovery continues.
