PRISTINA, Kosovo (AP) — Kosovo's lawmakers on Monday unanimously condemned recent war crimes verdicts by a European Union-backed court against four of its wartime rebel leaders, a rare act of unity in a Balkan country locked in a political crisis.
All 99 lawmakers present at the Parliament session approved a declaration that expressed concern over the convictions and urged authorities to act in what it described as defense of Kosovo's legacy of the 1998-99 war for independence from Serbia.
Earlier this month, a court in The Hague, Netherlands found former Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and three other former Kosovo Liberation Army commanders guilty of war crimes and sentenced them to between 13 and 25 years in prison.
Kosovo has criticized the verdicts as unjust, maintaining that the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, which Thaci had led before entering politics, fought against Serbian oppression. Both residents and politicians fear the court ruling would tarnish the struggle.
The parliamentary declaration called for a “joint state strategy” to coordinate legal, institutional and diplomatic actions to “protect and affirm the full historical truth about the just war for Kosovo’s freedom and liberation.”
Kosovo's acting President Albulena Haxhiu read out the declaration in the parliament.
More than 13,000 people died during the conflict, which ended after a NATO bombing forced Serbia to pull out of Kosovo, at the time a Serbian province. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, which Serbia still does not recognize.
Since the verdicts were handed down, thousands have rallied against them throughout Kosovo, adding pressure on the government of Prime Minister Albin Kurti who has faced a prolonged political crisis after a failure to elect a president.
Kurti now faces a new, Oct. 6 deadline for the political parties to agree on who should be the next president. Otherwise, early elections would have to be held — the third in a year.
Some opposition parties have conditioned their agreement on who should be president with a new law that would seek to limit the scope of the Specialist Chamber at The Hague that tried Thaci, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi.
Kurti has yet to respond to that demand. His government has promised support for the four in their appeals process.
The Netherlands-based court was established by Kosovo in 2015 with EU backing.
Kosovo has been told it must mend ties with Serbia if it wants to join the EU. An EU-mediated dialogue, however, has been stalled as tensions between former war foes continue to simmer.
FILE - Former Kosovo president Hashim Thaci, top left, appears before the Kosovo Tribunal as he defends himself against charges including murder, torture and persecution allegedly committed during his country's war for independence from Serbia in the Hague, on April 3, 2023. (Koen van Weel/Pool via AP, File)
FILE - Hashim Thaci, head of the Kosovo Albanian negotiation team and head of the Kosovo Liberation Army political directorate, center, addresses a press conference in a secret location in central Kosovo, Saturday, March 13, 1999. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu, File)
HONG KONG (AP) — From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled with fixing the issue.
Microsoft said in an update Friday that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”
The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”
More than 130,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook earlier on Thursday although new reports have since fallen from that peak.
A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.
Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.
Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote.
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday Microsoft had likened the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.
"They (Microsoft) don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told reporters in Sydney.
Texas-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike blamed a bug in an update that allowed its systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July 2024 that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company's Outlook accounts could not receive updates from their U.S. customers due to the outage. If the situation dragged on further, this could “impact the production timeline,” he said.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline company, said it also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said that government emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.
The Philippines' Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government’s IT infrastructure and that they were “keeping a close eye on the developments.”
OpenAI and Anthropic each reported that they were facing problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.
AP journalists Adam Schreck in Bangkok, Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi and Mayuko Ono in Tokyo contributed.
FILE - A Microsoft logo and sign outside the Microsoft Visitor Center are seen at the company's headquarters Monday, Nov. 9, 2026, in Redmond, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson, File)
