Microsoft is facing a global outage that has left Outlook, Teams, the Copilot assistant and other email-related services unusable for hours across regions from Asia to the United States, affecting individual users, companies and some government operations. The company said the interruption involved a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with Exchange Online and email services; the full extent of the disruption was unclear, though Microsoft reported in January it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
Microsoft outage: recovery efforts
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, said engineers were using a “measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure” and were trying different methods to identify the cause and bring servers back online. The company said it had no indication the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.” On Friday, Microsoft reported “early stabilization and capacity improvements” and “incremental improvement in several workloads,” but an outage-tracking site, status reports from dependent organizations and anecdotal posts on social media suggested problems persisted. A series of posts by the company on X indicated its engineers were still struggling to regain full control; hours after saying it had successfully restored service health and functionality, Microsoft updated its list of impacted services and said it was continuing to address the issue.
Impact on governments and businesses
Governments and businesses reported disruptions from Japan to Australia and in Europe. The British government said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services and that robust contingency plans were in place to minimize disruption. Police forces in the UK reported they could not receive crime reports online and urged the public to call emergency responders for urgent reports. The National Pharmacy Association warned of possible delays in obtaining prescriptions because the outage was affecting email systems used by the state-run National Health Service, while hospitals advised patients to attend appointments as usual. In the private sector, U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed its conference call for quarterly earnings because of the outage.
