Microsoft 365: Outlook has been disrupted worldwide for hours - Microsoft is trying to find a solution

Sensitive government areas are also affected by the disruption. In Australia, the secret service and the federal police reported failures. The Canberra government activated an agreement with Microsoft to ensure priority system restoration. Australian Home Affairs and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft was not expecting a cyberattack. Rather, it is apparently a faulty update, similar to the global IT breakdown caused by the security company CrowdStrike in 2024. The US House of Representatives also reported restrictions for its users.

The effects also spread widely throughout the economy. Artificial intelligence (AI) developers OpenAI and Anthropic investigated issues with interfaces to Microsoft services not working as expected. The US electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the presentation of its quarterly figures due to IT problems. Microsoft previously stated that a number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable. However, this is not due to a sudden increase in data traffic. Just last month, a failure of the Azure cloud platform caused problems worldwide.

Microsoft documented the solution efforts via messages on the online platform X, which were initially without resounding success. The software company initially reported problems with Exchange mailboxes in the USA. The company then said that the disruption could affect users of the Microsoft 365 cloud service worldwide. They said they were trying to route data traffic past potentially problematic servers.

In the next step, Microsoft seemed to be able to report success: a process had been discovered on the affected servers that was paralyzing them. It was then said that some of the servers would be brought back online – “and they remain stable so far”. An hour later, disappointed hopes followed: the servers could freeze again as soon as data traffic reached them, Microsoft engineers reported.

It was initially unclear how long the disruption could last

An attempt was then made to start up parts of the infrastructure in isolation, and “positive results” were seen, it was said. A little later, Microsoft had to admit another setback: the measures did not work as expected. How long the disruption could last remained unclear.

Online service outages occur again and again - but they are usually only short-lived. Sometimes, however, the problems are so serious or so difficult to find that disruptions occur for hours.