Microsoft outage exposes Estonian agencies’ reliance on one provider

A disruption to Microsoft services affected work at many Estonian institutions and businesses on Friday, including government agencies that use the company’s office software, ERR reported.

Outages in services including Outlook and Teams began on Thursday evening, disrupting email, calendars and other tools. Microsoft had not disclosed the cause by Friday noon.

The disruption also affected the courts’ email service, Äripäev reported. Harju County Court spokesperson Viivika Siplane said it was temporarily impossible to send procedural documents to courts by email. She advised people to submit them through the public e-file service.

Taivo Tender, deputy director for technology and innovation at the State IT Centre, said Microsoft had been chosen as the platform for the government’s central workplace service when state IT services began to be standardised. The centre was set up to improve the quality and security of government IT and bring specialist expertise together, he said.

Services provided by the State IT Centre are now used by 86 institutions, though not all government agencies are covered. The transition is gradual and depends on agreements with individual institutions.

Tender said Microsoft currently meets agencies’ needs, with no specific shortcomings identified. The centre is monitoring trials of alternatives in other European countries and plans to examine them more closely next year, to compare costs and assess reliance on a single provider.

Technology entrepreneur and expert Taavi Kotka said using Microsoft in government agencies was not inherently a problem and was not mandatory for all of them; some use open-source software. He said no other products had yet matched Word and Excel, and that occasional outages did not outweigh the benefits of the tools. Alternative services, he added, could not guarantee uninterrupted operation either.

Aare Reintam, a cybersecurity expert at Cybexer Technologies, said there was currently no reason to suspect a cyberattack. He said the disruption may have resulted from server overload and the rerouting of data traffic. When some servers fail, traffic is redirected to others, but those servers can also become overloaded. In this case, a secure-connection service may have become overwhelmed, making other services unavailable, he said.

Reintam said there were no signs that users’ personal data or passwords had been leaked or exposed to unauthorised people. He described the incident primarily as an availability problem.

He said the outage nevertheless showed how dependent businesses and government agencies had become on services from large technology companies. However, he did not consider it reasonable to replace the entire Microsoft ecosystem or to use services from several providers continuously in parallel.