Microsoft services outage enters second day, affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot globally

A global outage of Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot entered its second day on Friday, disrupting users around the world.

What happened

Problems with Microsoft products began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users began reporting that they could not access Outlook. Within about an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. Microsoft said the affected infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which was likely contributing to the connectivity errors. The company later said a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable.

Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyber-security incident. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said in a post on X late on Thursday: "We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."

Impact

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps according to Microsoft’s website. Downdetector had 140,000 people from 74 countries report issues with Outlook on Thursday evening. At about 07:00 GMT on Friday, it had received at least 43,000 reports of problems with Outlook from users in 72 countries.

Government agencies and services, including the Singaporean government and Australia’s spy agency, have also said they have been affected. Across the UK, GP surgeries, pharmacies, police and schools have been affected. Hospitals across Canada said the Microsoft outage affected their services. Unity Health Toronto declared a “Code Grey,” which is called when there is a loss or failure of infrastructure. Via Rail said passengers may not be able to receive email communications about their trip due to the outage.

Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic have both reported problems as a result of the outage. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft’s services, which has caused some tools to not work as expected.

Microsoft’s response

On Friday morning, Microsoft said it was seeing "early signs of stabilisation", but service capacity has "not yet returned to normal levels". In an earlier statement, the tech giant had said that its attempted fixes were "not taking as expected". In a statement on its service health page early on Friday, the company said it was monitoring activity across regions to assess server status and find ways to improve capacity. "This includes reviewing server performance and confirming that developed patches have been applied and working as intended after infrastructure reboots are completed," it said.

Microsoft has not given a timeline for full recovery. It has said that as capacity returns, users may see service come back gradually as their apps reconnect, rather than all at once.

---

Sources

• france24.com: 'One of the biggest outages ever': Disruption to Microsoft services enters second day - France 24
• bbc.co.uk: What we know about the global Microsoft outage - BBC News
• ctvnews.ca: Is Outlook down? VIA rail, hospitals report Microsoft outage
• globalnews.ca: CFL commissioner takes centre stage at Grey Cup | Globalnews.ca
• bbc.com: What happened overnight with the Microsoft global outage?
• aljazeera.com: Microsoft hit by global outages: What happened and why? | Technology News | Al Jazeera

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