Microsoft is battling a widespread global service disruption that has affected millions of users, businesses and government operations across several countries, with services including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and its AI assistant Copilot experiencing problems.
The outage, which began on Thursday, has continued for hours, affecting users across Asia, Europe and the United States as the technology giant works to restore normal operations.
In an update early Friday, Microsoft confirmed that the disruption was affecting a broad range of Microsoft 365 services connected to Exchange Online and its email infrastructure.
The company, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, said it was investigating several possible causes and taking a cautious approach to identifying and repairing the affected systems.
Microsoft added that it had found no indication that the incident was caused by malicious activity, promising to treat the disruption as an urgent priority until services were fully restored.
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, more than 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook at the peak of the disruption on Thursday.
Although Microsoft initially announced that service functionality had been restored, subsequent updates confirmed that problems were continuing across several services.
In its latest statement, the company said recovery efforts were progressing in stages but acknowledged that service performance remained inconsistent and system capacity had not yet returned to normal levels.
Global Impact on Businesses and Government Operations
The disruption has affected organizations beyond Microsoft’s own ecosystem. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic also reported difficulties connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, highlighting the growing dependence of artificial intelligence platforms on external business software.
US industrial technology company Workhorse Group postponed a conference call concerning its quarterly financial results because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had compared the incident to the major CrowdStrike disruption in July 2024.
Burke said he had spoken with Microsoft’s senior executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the situation.
According to the minister, Microsoft did not believe the incident was a cyberattack and suspected it could involve an update-related problem similar to the CrowdStrike failure.
The 2024 CrowdStrike incident disrupted millions of computers worldwide after a faulty software update caused widespread system failures, grounding flights and affecting television broadcasters, banks, hospitals and retailers.
Businesses in Asia have also reported operational difficulties. Hong Kong businessman Danny Lau, who runs an aluminium company, said his firm’s Outlook accounts were unable to receive updates from US customers, warning that a prolonged disruption could affect production schedules.
Air India confirmed that its flight operations remained unaffected but temporarily redirected its email services to ensure customer enquiries continued to be received.
Indian airline IndiGo also reported disruptions to its email support services, affecting its ability to receive customer requests. However, the company said its other customer support channels and flight operations continued functioning normally.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency confirmed that government email services had been affected and said it was working with Microsoft to resolve the problem.
The Supreme Court of the Philippines also reported that the ongoing Microsoft 365 disruption had affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki confirmed that the outage had affected government IT infrastructure, adding that authorities were closely monitoring developments.
Microsoft has not yet announced a definitive timeline for the complete restoration of all affected services.
