A wide range of problems have been reported due to outages at Microsoft, with thousands of users across 74 countries and regions affected, including Greece. Stella Tsitsoula, President of the Greek Institute of Cybersecurity, addressed the recent outage affecting core Microsoft 365 services — which had a significant impact on users in Greece — explaining that the problem was likely caused by server overload. She also analyzed the secondary cybersecurity risks that arise from such incidents, including phishing attacks, while stressing the need for alternative communication systems, regular backups, and reduced business dependence on a single provider.
Speaking on ERT News Radio 105.8, she said: “It appears that servers that were not functioning properly were taken offline, which created chaos and overloaded other servers — because when some go down, requests are redirected to others, causing those servers to become overwhelmed. That’s what led to the problem we’ve seen over the last few hours. A cyberattack has been ruled out. It doesn’t appear to be any kind of attack. Two years ago, there was a similar failure where systems went offline for technical reasons. We really need to revisit the question of how much, as businesses, we’re investing in single providers — this is an issue we need to reconsider. This vulnerability is now clearly visible. Today’s incident is very significant; it’s yet another wake-up call about how we design our digital lives as businesses. We’re leaving our systems in the hands of a single provider without any redundancy, and we can see that when one provider goes down, the whole world collapses. (…) I would strongly recommend multiple independent, regular backups. We need to redesign our entire digital infrastructure and understand that we cannot base our digital lives on a single product or platform. We need to know what happens if that product goes offline — if the power gets cut. This needs to become a fundamental principle, and we need to rethink the way we operate.”
Among other points, Ms. Tsitsoula noted that beyond the disruption of key tools like Outlook and Stream, a digital blackout of this scale opens the door to serious cybersecurity threats — ranging from phishing attacks to employees resorting to unsecured personal communication channels.
Microsoft outage follows cyberattacks on refrigeration systems and bomb threats at airports
Ms. Tsitsoula described the incident as one of “very particular significance,” as it occurred in the wake of cyberattacks targeting refrigeration systems across various European countries and bomb threats at European airports. “This incident essentially shows how dependent the global economy has become,” she emphasized.
She noted that her own email continues to function despite being on Outlook, explaining that not all of Microsoft’s infrastructure has been affected.
“In Greece, some businesses have been affected while others have not, because only certain Microsoft servers have gone offline. This means that I may be connected to a different server that isn’t experiencing any issues,” she explained.
“A very large number of businesses are connected to platforms like Outlook and Teams — companies across the world and in Greece that have clients and partners linked through these platforms. Communication typically flows through these tools, and that affects the entire operation of a business — both economically and in terms of internal and external communication. So the damage is far-reaching,” she added.
She emphasized that the Microsoft services incident serves as “a wake-up call for how we need to design our digital infrastructure — both as businesses and as individual citizens.”
“We’ve entered an era where we rely on a single provider for everything. When there’s no redundancy, these problems occur. There are no alternatives, which creates enormous difficulty for businesses trying to function,” she explained.
She noted that companies and users “need to explore the alternative of moving to multiple providers and diversifying, because otherwise there’s nothing they can do but wait for the problem to be resolved.”
She also recalled that a similar technical failure had occurred two years ago, with the recovery taking three days. Finally, regarding what users can do while the issue is being resolved, she advised against accessing email through the Outlook application, as there is currently no way to substitute for it directly — and suggested that for Outlook, users should access their email via webmail instead.
