Weather 
From Asia to the U.S., a Microsoft outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations.
The outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down. The effects rippled across the world, causing disruptions to business activity, government agencies and schools.
On Friday morning, the Redmond, Washington-based company said it was making “encouraging recovery progress,” noting improvements in email delivery. However, users may still experience “intermittent issues” as the company continues its recovery efforts, Microsoft said.
The outage affected Microsoft’s suite of business products, as well as those geared toward personal use for individuals, students and families. The Microsoft outage impacted people in 74 countries and territories, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks technology outages.
“Microsoft in a Friday the 13th moment as global outage a [causes] very bad day in Redmond,” Yorkville Ives and Co. tech analyst Dan Ives said in an X post Friday. “There will be major questions for MSFT in this global outage.”
Trying to get the problem under control
Microsoft said it tried different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”
The company said it didn’t have any indication the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency until full mitigation.”
Microsoft updated users about its recovery progress through posts on its Microsoft 365 Status X account.
“We’re seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific,” the company wrote in a post on Friday at 8:32 a.m. ET. “Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure.”
“Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs while we validate service consistency across connection methods,” it said.
Widespread impact
While reports of Microsoft issues had surpassed 130,000 on Thursday, they had started to wane by Friday morning, Downdetector said.
Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website.
The outage disrupted email for hours, hampering work activity for some employees.
“It’s just challenging sending reports or things that needed to be approved,” one woman told CBS News Los Angeles.
However, some took delight in the slowdown, with social users posting videos celebrating the freedom of not having access to email.
Companies worldwide report issues
OpenAI and Anthropic each reported problems connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call on its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday Microsoft had likened the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.
“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,” Burke told reporters in Sydney.
Texas-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike blamed a bug in an update that allowed its systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July 2024 that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off the air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company’s Outlook accounts couldn’t receive updates from its U.S. customers due to the outage. If the situation dragged on further, this could “impact the production timeline,” he said.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline company, said it also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government email services were down and that it is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.
The Philippines’ Supreme Court said in a statement on social media that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government’s IT infrastructure and that they were “keeping a close eye on the developments.”
