REDMOND, Washington (The Thursday Times) — Microsoft was still struggling on Friday to restore Outlook and other workplace services, nearly a day after a global outage cut off email for users in dozens of countries and disrupted government offices, airlines, and hospitals.
The problems began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, 9pm in Pakistan, when users started reporting that they could not open Outlook. Teams and Copilot, the company’s artificial intelligence assistant, were also disrupted. By Thursday evening the tracking site Downdetector had logged about 140,000 reports of Outlook problems from 74 countries. The true number is likely far higher, because the site counts only people who report a fault.
Microsoft said a large number of its servers had become “unexpectedly unavailable”, putting “elevated load” on the rest, and that the extra strain had not come from a rise in traffic. It said overnight that its fixes were “not taking as expected”. On Friday it reported “early signs of stabilisation” but said capacity had not yet returned to normal. It was also rolling back a network change, without saying whether that change was to blame.
No cyberattack, Microsoft says
The company has ruled out a cyberattack. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said in a post on X late on Thursday that there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”.
Australia’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft had told him the same. He compared the failure to the 2024 CrowdStrike crash, saying the company believed it was dealing with “an update that has gone awry”.
Government systems in Singapore and Japan were disrupted, as were communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines. In Australia, the country’s spy agency and the federal police were among those affected. In Britain, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies, police forces, and schools reported problems, and airlines issued advisories to passengers. The outage also reached companies that build on Microsoft’s services, with OpenAI and Anthropic both reporting problems.
‘A lost business day’
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to the company’s website. Microsoft has not said how many were affected.
Gergely Orosz, a former senior engineer at Skype and Uber, said it could be the “most disruptive” business email outage “of all time”, adding that he could not recall one taking so long to fix. Paul Spain of the New Zealand advisory firm Gorilla Technology said many companies had practically “lost a business day”.
