Ministry of Science and ICT sets up emergency response team over Microsoft outage

South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT has established an emergency response team to monitor recovery and assess damage from Microsoft's service outage.

The ministry said Saturday it had formed the team with Microsoft Korea to continuously monitor service restoration and track disruptions reported by domestic users.

Through Microsoft Korea, the ministry confirmed the state of service recovery and reviewed reports of user disruptions and damage. It also directed major domestic platform operators to conduct their own system checks to prevent further outages, the ministry said.

The Microsoft 365 service went down Friday, disrupting email communications for some businesses in South Korea.

According to Microsoft, the outage was not caused by a cyberattack or an AI-related issue. A problem dormant since a previous network capacity upgrade resurfaced following a recent network change.

Microsoft apologized Saturday, saying it "takes responsibility very seriously" and that "extensive recovery and stabilization is underway across our services."