Outlook, Teams, Copilot: Microsoft reports the end of a major disruption in its services

Emails got stuck, virtual meetings couldn't be planned: a major disruption caused massive outages in Microsoft services. Now Outlook, Teams and Co. are apparently fully operational again.

Nothing worked for a good day: system-relevant Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams had been disrupted since Thursday. They are now working again, as the company has now announced on its website. “We have completed our efforts to resolve the underlying cause of the incident and have restored service to the remaining affected customers and regions,” Microsoft also wrote on X.

Consumer services were fully operational again on Friday around 5:10 p.m. (CET), the company said. There have been problems with Microsoft 365 services for corporate customers for a long time. Above all, the large backlog of emails that had to be processed caused delays. Due to the severity of the incident, the situation will be monitored over a longer period of time, it said on the company's status page.

A massive global outage of Microsoft services impacted businesses, governments and other users around the globe. Microsoft only spoke on Friday afternoon of a significant improvement in the server problems that first occurred on Thursday. This applies especially to North America and Europe.

With hundreds of millions of users, Outlook and Teams are among the most used applications in the workplace. The outage prevented users from using important functions such as sending emails, managing calendars and holding virtual meetings.

The company emphasized that the disruption was caused by a domestic problem and not by a cyberattack or AI activity. There is also no connection to the technical breakdown that has led to thousands of flight cancellations in the USA since late Friday evening (CET). The reason was ultimately a previously carried out upgrade of the network capacity. A problem that was introduced only became apparent after recent network changes, it was said.

It is the second outage of Microsoft 365 services this year, following similar problems in January. Just last month, a failure of the Azure cloud platform caused disruptions worldwide.

Outlook down, teams in some cases as well, agreements difficult to make - in many places work was hardly possible in the past few hours. In such cases, can you use private email addresses at work? Or maybe even free up if the software goes on strike? Read that here.