A Microsoft outage affecting Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services continued into a second day on Friday, disrupting businesses, individuals and government operations across Asia, Europe and the United States.
Microsoft said the disruption was caused by a technical problem rather than malicious or cyber activity. It said the underlying issue had been resolved and that engineers were working to restore normal service, although full recovery had not yet been given an estimated completion time.
The company reported improving email delivery and broader progress in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. It warned, however, that customers could still face intermittent access problems and delays in receiving messages.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”
The outage affected a wide range of products connected to Exchange Online and Microsoft’s email systems, including the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant. More than 70 countries and territories recorded disruptions, according to Downdetector, while Microsoft 365 apps are used by more than 430 million people, according to the company.
Microsoft outage causes disruption worldwide
Microsoft first reported technical problems shortly before 1pm Eastern Time on Thursday. Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 user reports that day, although the number had begun to fall by Friday morning.
The problems left some employees unable to send reports or obtain approvals. OpenAI and Anthropic also reported difficulties connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, while US industrial technology company Workhorse Group postponed a quarterly earnings call.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had compared the incident with the CrowdStrike outage in 2024. He said Microsoft did not believe it was dealing with a cyber attack and instead suspected an issue resembling an update that had gone wrong.
The CrowdStrike incident, caused by a bug in an update, disrupted flights, television broadcasts, banks, hospitals and retailers around the world in July 2024.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice-president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, said “technical challenges and failure modes” had made the recovery more difficult than usual. He said a detailed post-mortem would be published, including a timeline of the incident and measures intended to prevent similar outages.
The disruption also affected organisations in the Asia-Pacific region. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government email services were unavailable, while the Philippines’ Supreme Court reported that some operations, including email responses, had been affected.
Japan’s deputy chief cabinet secretary, Masanao Ozaki, said the outage had affected government IT infrastructure and that officials were monitoring developments closely.
Air India said its flights were operating normally but that it had temporarily rerouted email services so customer enquiries could continue to reach the airline. IndiGo reported disruption to its email support service, while saying its other support channels and flight operations remained unaffected.
A Hong Kong aluminium company said it could not receive updates from US customers through Outlook, raising concerns that a prolonged outage could affect its production timetable.
