Microsoft outage hits Outlook, Teams for firms and governments

Microsoft is working to restore services after a major outage that has lasted for hours and affected users, companies and some government operations around the world. Users reported that Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot were down.

In an update on Friday, Microsoft said the outage affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with Exchange Online and email services. The company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause and bring its servers back online.

Microsoft said it had no indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity, and that it would treat the incident with urgency and priority until it is fully resolved. More than 130,000 users on Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook on Thursday, and new reports have since fallen from that peak.

Hours after restoring service health, Microsoft said it had updated its list of impacted services and was still addressing the issue. In a statement it said: "We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected."

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he spoke to Microsoft's top executive in Australia and the national cybersecurity coordinator. He said: "They (Microsoft) don't believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry." CrowdStrike blamed a bug in an update in July 2024 for a global outage that hit flights, TV broadcasts, banks, hospitals and retailers.

Governments in Asia reported effects. Singapore's Government Technology Agency said government emails were down and that it was working with Microsoft. The Philippines' Supreme Court said some operations, including email responses, were affected. Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage affected the government's IT infrastructure.

Businesses were also hit. IndiGo said its email support services were disrupted, limiting its ability to receive customer queries, though other support channels and flights were unaffected. Air India said flight operations were unaffected and it temporarily rerouted its email services. Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call on quarterly earnings. Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau said his company's Outlook accounts could not receive updates from U.S. customers, which would "impact the production timeline". OpenAI and Anthropic each reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools.