What we know about the global outage

A major global Microsoft outage has caused problems, or in some cases disabled entire services, including emails and artificial intelligence products.

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".

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 and are using messaging and online meeting functions without issues.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps according to Microsoft's website.

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.

The real figure affected is likely much higher because Downdetector relies primarily on users self-reporting.

Microsoft 365 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.

Several GP practices across the UK have warned of potential problems, with some instructing patients to make urgent queries over the phone instead of by email or web form.