MS365 service disruption hits many Korean companies

Telecom law does not require Microsoft to report outages to regulators

Korea Communications Commission says it is checking whether Microsoft met user-notification obligations

A view of Microsoft's headquarters. [Provided by Microsoft]
A view of Microsoft's headquarters. [Provided by Microsoft]

"I just sat there in a daze." "I was forced into a paid do-nothing day." (Posts from an online workplace community)

A service outage affecting Microsoft 365 (MS365), Microsoft's suite of workplace software, effectively brought work to a standstill for office workers across South Korea on Friday. The disruption knocked out the Outlook email service among other tools, causing widespread operational chaos at South Korean companies that rely on MS365.

As the sudden outage deepened the chaos for businesses, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the agency responsible for overseeing such matters, found itself with little recourse beyond monitoring official notices posted by Microsoft Korea on its social media channels.

According to industry sources, South Korean companies struggled as the MS365 outage — including Outlook mail — dragged on after first emerging Thursday.

MS365 is a cloud-based subscription service offering enterprise and personal plans that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. The platform is used by about 450 million business accounts and about 95 million individual and household subscribers worldwide.

A significant number of South Korean companies use MS365 for daily operations. Microsoft Korea's business is divided into cloud and AI infrastructure, productivity and business software, and personal computing and devices. Business software accounts for a considerable share of that mix.

Microsoft Korea posted sales of 2.09 trillion won ($1.57 billion) and operating profit of 97.27 billion won for the fiscal year from July last year through June this year.

[Provided by the Korea Communications Commission]
[Provided by the Korea Communications Commission]

Despite the harm to South Korean corporate customers, Microsoft Korea has no legal obligation to report the outage to the KCC.

The Telecommunications Business Act's enforcement decree requires telecom service providers to notify users when service is interrupted, but it does not impose a reporting obligation on providers toward the regulator. Moreover, Microsoft Korea's services are not listed among the companies subject to the KCC's annual user-protection assessment under that decree.

As a result, even as corporate losses mount, authorities have no choice but to rely on posts from Microsoft's own social media accounts to track the cause and scope of the disruption.

Microsoft said on X, formerly Twitter, at around 3 p.m. Friday that it was "continuing work to restore front-end servers while at the same time implementing additional traffic optimization measures to improve service stability and increase processing capacity" — a sign that the outage remained unresolved after many hours.

With concrete harm to corporate customers now emerging, the dispute could also be referred to telecommunications dispute mediation.

The KCC said it was "reviewing matters related to the obligation to notify users in the event of a telecommunications service outage" and was "checking whether Microsoft has fulfilled that obligation."


ko@heraldcorp.com