The 2024 Paris Olympics suffered “limited” disruption to its operations for several hours on Friday due to a global computer failure in Microsoft’s systems, the organization acknowledged on Friday.
The North American tech giant’s restrictions caused some operational issues that have since been resolved, with the impact not appearing to be too severe on Paris 2024’s organisation a week before the opening ceremony.
The “violations” and “restrictions” mainly concerned the issuance of “uniforms and accreditations,” and after a few hours everything returned to “normal.”
“All of our servers were affected this morning. We didn’t necessarily foresee this global outage days before the Games,” lamented the president of the organizing committee, Tony Estangue.
Since the athletes were able to settle in the Olympic Village from Thursday, some of them were unable to obtain accreditation, an inconvenience that was resolved within a few hours.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Single Accreditation and Distribution Centre has decided to extend its opening hours and instead of closing at 21:00 (20:00 in Lisbon) it will only close at 23:00 (22:00).
This decision also aims to address the problems that have arisen at Orly and Roissy airports, the main entry points for foreign delegations to Paris 2024.
“The Paris 2024 computer system has not collapsed a priori,” a spokesman for the French Olympic movement said, meaning that the remaining preparations for the event were not affected.