A major global outage at Microsoft has disrupted or completely shut down entire services, including email and artificial intelligence tools. Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack. However, its efforts to fix the problem have so far largely failed.
Services affected
Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Outlook and the AI software Copilot, experienced what the company described as “connectivity issues”.
Many users reported that they could not send or receive emails, open certain files or view details in their calendar apps.
Some users were able to log in to Teams and use messaging and online meetings as normal. However, the BBC reported that these cases were considerably fewer.
Scale of the disruption
According to Microsoft’s website, more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps. The exact extent of the problem has not yet been confirmed. The outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded the following for Outlook on Thursday evening:
- 140,000 user reports of problems
- reports from 74 countries
The BBC noted that the actual number of affected users is likely to be much higher, as Downdetector relies mainly on reports submitted by users themselves. Because Microsoft 365 is used by businesses around the world, a knock-on effect on other services is expected.
Impact on technology companies and public bodies
Technology companies OpenAI and Anthropic both reported problems caused by the outage.
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft services, which meant some of its tools were not working as expected.
State services and organisations, including the government of Singapore and Australia’s intelligence agency, also said they had been affected.
Several GP surgeries across the United Kingdom warned of possible disruption. Some asked patients to call by phone for urgent matters instead of using email or online forms.
Microsoft’s explanation
Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack and attributed the ongoing problem to “increased load” on its infrastructure. The term describes a situation in which servers come under far greater pressure than usual.
According to the company, a large number of its servers went “unexpectedly offline”. Additional traffic was redirected to the remaining servers, overloading them.
On Friday morning, Microsoft said it had seen “limited progress” in its efforts to deal with the incident.
In its latest update, the company said it was continuing to monitor activity across all regions to assess the state of its servers and decide on its next steps to increase capacity.
In an earlier statement, Microsoft had acknowledged that the corrective measures it attempted were “not producing the expected results”.
What experts say
Australian cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt told the BBC that the outage could have wide-ranging consequences.
“Microsoft is a huge part of the backbone of the internet, and this reminds us how critical email remains. This outage affects not only many people’s ability to work, but also everyday processes, such as arranging appointments, purchases that require verification, and creating or accessing accounts and services,” he said.
Paul Spain of New Zealand-based consultancy Gorilla Technology said that with email and services down, businesses had effectively “lost a working day”, which he said was “causing intense frustration” among users.
This is a developing story.
With information from BBC
