Microsoft makes progress on recovery from global Microsoft 365 outage

Microsoft said it was working to limit the effects of a worldwide outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access email, according to a report published by Nieuws.nl on Friday.

The company attributed the disruption to “elevated load” on its infrastructure and said measures taken so far had not delivered the expected fix. The outage lasted through much of the US working day, the report said.

Downdetector, which tracks user reports, recorded disruption across 74 countries and territories within an hour. Microsoft products are widely used by businesses, governments and educational institutions.

The disruption follows connectivity problems affecting Teams, Outlook and Copilot reported the previous day. Microsoft’s earlier outage was also linked by the company to strain on its infrastructure after servers unexpectedly became unavailable.

Update

Microsoft says it has completed recovery work on part of the infrastructure behind its Microsoft 365 services in Asia-Pacific, as a worldwide outage continues to disrupt Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

The company said it was still working on infrastructure in other regions. Earlier, it attributed the disruption to a heavily loaded process on some servers, which it said had caused services to fail. Microsoft said it had found no indication so far that malicious actors caused the outage.

The problems have affected organisations in the Netherlands, including universities, local councils and regional broadcasters. Euronext has advised listed companies to phone rather than email when passing on information. In the UK, the GMB union said the outage was having “serious consequences” for healthcare.

The full scale of the disruption has not been confirmed. Downdetector recorded reports of Outlook problems from 74 countries and territories, while users experienced different levels of access: some could not send or receive email, while some Teams functions remained available.