Microsoft works to restore global Teams and Outlook outage

Microsoft is working to restore global services including Teams and Outlook after an outage affected millions of users for more than 12 hours on Thursday and Friday.

Outage and recovery efforts

Microsoft said it was seeing “early signs of stabilisation” in its efforts to improve capacity to enable more users to get back on its systems. In an update shortly after 11am GMT, the company said: “We’ve made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region.”

The company added: “Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues.”

Microsoft said there were no indications that the outage had been caused by a cyber-attack. It determined a number of servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” because of a problem that caused them to fail during automated checks. The company has suggested the outage may have been caused by problems with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 up and running.

“Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defence-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report,” Microsoft said.

Impact on users and organisations

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, and more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Copilot, Microsoft’s AI chatbot, according to the company.

The outage website Down Detector showed an increase in Microsoft 365 problems at about 6pm GMT on Thursday, with nearly 130,000 reports of problems in 74 countries affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Copilot was also affected.

The Microsoft outage also hit connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services. OpenAI said it was investigating a problem with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools were not working as expected. Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

The UK government said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, adding that there were “robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption.”

With the NHS email system disrupted, pharmacies were reporting issues communicating with some GP surgeries about prescriptions, leading to “significant” waiting times for medicines. Several UK police forces urged people not to try to report crimes online and to phone them in instead. Some schools in the UK notified parents that services such as email and Teams were down, and that reporting attendance or absence issues had to be done via phone. National Rail warned that people may not be able to access tickets that have been emailed to them.

The Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected, and Taiwanese security firms, life insurers and investment trust companies said fund management services had been disrupted. In Japan, the shipping company Sagawa Express said it was unable to accept online reservations for some of its services at airports and train stations while Taisho, a leading pharmaceutical company, said it was having to handle orders by phone.

Why it matters

The outage disrupted businesses, healthcare services, police forces, schools, airlines and financial markets worldwide that rely on Microsoft 365 apps and services.

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Sources

• theguardian.com: Microsoft scrambles to fix global outage affecting Teams and Outlook | Microsoft | The Guardian
• videogameschronicle.com: Microsoft struggles to restore online services after major outage | VGC

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