What we know about the global Microsoft outage
Microsoft attributes the widespread service disruption to elevated infrastructure load, ruling out a cyber-attack.
Quick Look
- A major global Microsoft outage has disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 services, with Downdetector recording nearly 140,000 reports from 74 countries around 18:00 GMT on Thursday.
- Microsoft ruled out a cyber-attack, attributing the disruption to elevated load on its infrastructure, and reported only marginal success in fixing the issue by Friday morning.
AI-generated summary
Why It Matters
Microsoft 365 services including Teams, Outlook, and Copilot experienced connectivity problems affecting customers worldwide. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps according to Microsoft's website.
A major global Microsoft outage has caused problems, or in some cases disabled entire services, including emails and artificial intelligence products.
Reports of problems with the email provider Outlook peaked globally at nearly 140,000 around 18:00 GMT on Thursday, according to monitoring website Downdetector.
Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyber-security incident, but efforts to fix the issues have so far been largely unsuccessful.
Here's what we know about the services affected and what went wrong.
Microsoft 365 Services, including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft's artificial intelligence software Copilot, have been affected by "connectivity problems".
While customers are reporting varying levels of access - many have not been able to send or receive emails, view certain files or details on their calendar apps.
Some users have been able to use Teams as normal and are using messaging and online meeting functions as usual.
The full scale of the outage has not been confirmed, but monitoring website Downdetector had 140,000 people from 74 countries report issues with Outlook on Thursday evening.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps according to Microsoft's website.
The software is also used by companies worldwide and is expected to have a knock-on effect to other services.
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.
Government agencies and services, including the Singaporean government and Australia's spy agency, have also said they have been affected.
Microsoft has ruled out a cyber-attack and attributed the ongoing outage to "elevated load" on its infrastructure.
The term refers to when servers are handling a much higher volume of stress than they usually do.
In the case of the Microsoft outage, a large number of servers became "unexpectedly unavailable", the company said, which sent added traffic to remaining servers, straining these.
On Friday morning, Microsoft said it had observed "marginal success" in its efforts to treat the incident.
The company said in its latest update that is it continuing to monitor activity across regions to evaluate server status and determine what actions it can take to improve capacity.
In an earlier statement, the tech giant had said that its attempted fixes were "not taking as expected".
Open Questions
- What specifically caused the servers to become unexpectedly unavailable?
- How long will it take to fully restore all services?
- What is the total number of users affected globally?
