Microsoft outage sparks baseless conspiracy theories online

A global Microsoft outage disrupting Outlook, Teams, and Copilot has sparked unsubstantiated conspiracy theories online, linking the event to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's departure, a Chinese cyberattack, and rogue AI. Microsoft attributes the disruption to infrastructure and server capacity problems, not malicious activity. The outage began late Thursday and continued into Friday, affecting email, workplace communication, and cloud services for users worldwide. Social media posts speculated on connections between Huang's exit and the outage, with some claiming China attacked US communications infrastructure, but no evidence supports these claims. Microsoft's investigation found no indication of cyber activity. Microsoft identified reduced server capacity and an overwhelmed core process as the cause, with nearly 130,000 users reporting problems at the peak. The disruption also impacted government departments in Australia, prompting concerns about reliance on cloud services, while Microsoft continues working to restore affected services.