Microsoft 365 Outage Hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot Worldwide
A disruption to the email and office services of US technology company Microsoft affected users in at least 74 countries and territories. The company has not yet fully restored service but says it has no indication of malicious activity.
Technology company Microsoft said on Friday that a widespread outage is affecting its Microsoft 365 office software products that interact with its Exchange Online email service. Users report that the Outlook email system, the Teams communication platform and the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant are not working. Government bodies and businesses in various parts of the world have been affected.
What is known about the cause and the fix
The disruption began on Thursday at about 18:00 Latvian time. According to the outage-tracking website Downdetector, problems were reported in 74 countries and territories within roughly an hour, and more than 130,000 users reported trouble accessing Outlook.
Microsoft says it is trying various ways to establish the cause and restore its servers, using a "thoughtful approach" to identifying and fixing the affected infrastructure. The company had restarted servers in the hope of bringing them back, but its latest post on X admitted that changes made to improve performance were not working as intended. The company says it has no indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity.
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had compared the outage to the major IT disruption of 2024, which was caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Impact on organisations
The outage also affected some services of the artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic.
In Germany, rail operator Deutsche Bahn reported significant delays in sending emails, which complicated the distribution of timetables for rerouted trains. In New Zealand, government agencies and businesses were forced to switch to manual working methods, and the Immigration service suspended all visa application processing.
In Canada, the hospital organisation Unity Health Toronto declared a "code grey," which is used when infrastructure is lost or disrupted. It said its email system was down but patient care was not affected.
The Indian airlines Air India and IndiGo and Singapore's government technology agency also reported Outlook problems. The Supreme Court of the Philippines and the Japanese government said the outage was affecting their IT infrastructure.