Microsoft says it has made only marginal progress in restoring its widely used workplace services, more than 12 hours after a global outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot across 74 countries. The company said it was monitoring activity across regions to assess server performance and identify ways to improve capacity.
“This includes reviewing server performance and confirming that developed patches have been applied and working as intended after infrastructure reboots are completed,” the company said.
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Users began reporting problems accessing Outlook, Microsoft’s email platform, at 16:00 GMT on Thursday. Within about an hour, outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories.
Microsoft initially said it was investigating problems in the Americas but later confirmed that users in any region could be affected. The company said the affected infrastructure was experiencing elevated loads across multiple regions, likely contributing to connectivity errors. It later reported that several servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, adding that the elevated load was not caused by an increase in traffic.
The disruption continued through the U.S. working day and into the night. By Friday morning in Europe, the outage had yet to be resolved, with some servers restored by Microsoft failing again.
“I don’t think it’s unprecedented. I mean, the scale is impressive,” Rupert Goodwins, a technology analyst and journalist, told Al Jazeera. “It’s very embarrassing for Microsoft and really, really annoying for the rest of us.”
While Microsoft has not confirmed how many users were affected, Downdetector, a website that allows users to report problems with online services, said it had received at least 43,000 reports of Outlook problems from users in 74 countries as of 7:00 GMT on Friday. The actual number of affected users is likely much higher, as the figure only accounts for people who visited the website to report an issue.
“There’s about 430 million people who use Microsoft services,” said Walter Pasquarelli, an affiliate researcher at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and an AI specialist. “What we do know so far is that this is first and foremost a communication risk.”
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The disruption also affected government systems in Singapore and Japan, as well as communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines. In Australia, the country’s spy agency and federal police were among the organizations affected.
Microsoft has not disclosed the root cause of the outage but said it was not the result of a cyberattack.
“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said in a post on X late Thursday.