Microsoft reported having only "marginal success" in restoring its most widely used workplace services more than 12 hours after a global outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, and Copilot in 74 countries. The disruption began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday and affected users across all regions, including the Americas. Downdetector logged at least 43,000 reports of Outlook issues by Friday morning, though the true number of affected users is likely much higher.
The outage impacted various sectors, including government systems in Singapore and Japan, the Supreme Court of the Philippines, and federal police and spy agencies in Australia. The disruption also affected integrations used by AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic. While Outlook was the hardest-hit service, users reported being unable to access mailboxes via web or mobile apps, and many experienced significant email delays.
Microsoft stated the outage was not the result of a cyberattack. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said in a post on X that there was no indication of malicious or cyber activity. The company noted that a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable and were experiencing elevated load, though it clarified that the load was not caused by an increase in traffic.
On Friday, Microsoft began rolling back a network change, though the company did not specify if that change caused the connectivity errors. The company is currently reviewing server performance and confirming that patches applied after infrastructure reboots are working as intended. "It’s very embarrassing for Microsoft and really, really annoying for the rest of us," technology analyst and journalist Rupert Goodwins told Al Jazeera.
