Microsoft says global Outlook, Teams and Copilot outage fix is not working as expected

Microsoft says its attempts to fix a global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot are not going as expected, and the company has not stated when services will be fully restored.

What happened

Thousands of users reported trouble accessing email and work apps after a widespread outage hit Outlook and other Microsoft services. Reports of problems with Outlook climbed to about 130,000 on the outage tracking site Downdetector shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (18:00 GMT), with users saying emails were not being sent or received and inboxes could not be opened. At one point, reports to the platform reached almost 20,000 per minute, stemming from outages across five Microsoft services in 74 countries.

Users also reported issues with Teams, Copilot and wider Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft said the issues could impact users in any region.

Microsoft's response

Microsoft said on X that servers were unavailable and failing automatic health checks. The company said it was testing a configuration change to redistribute traffic that was elevated on parts of its infrastructure and restarting affected services to bring them back online.

In a statement, Microsoft said: "we’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected". The company added: "We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances."

Microsoft said its investigation found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to capacity loss. The company said it was also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.

Impact

Affected organizations included the Australian Federal Police, the ABC, national supermarket chain Coles, and government agencies in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia. Health NZ said its Digital Services team was working with Microsoft to get things back up and running, with some services reverting to "more manual systems to keep things moving".

Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the outage was not the result of a cyberattack. He said Microsoft believed the situation was similar in some ways to what happened with CrowdStrike, where an update had gone awry.

Why it matters

The outage disrupted email, calendar access, messaging and AI assistant services for businesses, government agencies and individual users worldwide. Microsoft said it was prioritising life, safety and government services, but had not provided a timeline for full restoration.

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Sources

• indianexpress.com: Outlook, Teams, Copilot hit globally; Microsoft says attempts to fix not going ‘as expected’ | Technology News - The Indian Express
• kbc.co.ke: Microsoft says attempts to fix global outage not going 'as expected' | KBC Digital
• smh.com.au: Microsoft outage: Outlook, Teams and Copilot services hit by major connectivity issues
• 1news.co.nz: Microsoft fix 'not taking as expected' - global outage drags on
• chrislynchmedia.com: Microsoft admits latest fix has failed as global outage continues - Chris Lynch Media
• theage.com.au: Microsoft outage: Outlook, Teams and Copilot services hit by major connectivity issues

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.