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Artificial intelligence could make it possible to develop more sophisticated cyberattacks, potentially increasing cybersecurity risks, former Microsoft France chief Christophe Aulnette has warned.

Aulnette made the remarks in an interview with French radio station Franceinfo.

A large-scale outage affecting Microsoft's Outlook email service has disrupted services for millions of users across 74 countries, including France. Other applications, including Microsoft Teams and the Copilot AI assistant, have also experienced technical problems.

Microsoft said that measures taken to resolve the disruption had failed to deliver the expected results. The company added that it was exploring alternative solutions to address the outage, which was attributed to excessive infrastructure load.

Aulnette, who served as president of Microsoft France from 1988 to 2005, said the incident had exposed vulnerabilities arising from the growing digital interdependence of the modern world.

He stressed that the interconnected nature of digital systems creates potential weak points capable of triggering serious disruptions on a global scale.

Although Aulnette said he had no specific information indicating that the Outlook outage was caused by a cyberattack, he warned that artificial intelligence could facilitate the development of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

He also criticised Microsoft's crisis communications, describing the company's response as disorganised and suggesting that it had shown a degree of confusion in handling the situation.