Microsoft said on Friday that it had only partly restored Outlook, Teams and Copilot more than 12 hours after a global outage began. The disruption has affected schools, doctors’ surgeries, courts, government offices and businesses in several countries.
Problems began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, according to Al Jazeera. Within about an hour, Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. At its peak, Reuters reported, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 Outlook problem reports in the US.
Microsoft attributed the problems to “elevated load” after many of its servers became unexpectedly unavailable. Charles Lamanna, a Microsoft executive vice president, wrote on X that there was no indication of malicious or cyber activity. The company said traffic adjustments had brought partial recovery in some regions but not sustained recovery. It has not given a timeline for full restoration and has promised a Post-Incident Report with the root cause once recovery is complete.
In England, Stroud High School and May Lane GP Surgery in Dursley urged people to use other ways of contacting them while email was down. In Australia, schools, courts and government services were disrupted, and some schools texted parents to phone in absences. Immigration New Zealand paused the processing of all visa applications. A UK government spokesperson said officials were working closely with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services.
OpenAI and Anthropic also reported problems with tools that connect their AI services to Microsoft 365, according to The Conversation. Banks have warned customers to watch for scams that exploit the outage.
