From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.
Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
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The extent of the outage wasn’t clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
The company indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress Friday, saying it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements,” and that there was “incremental improvement in several workloads.” But problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company’s services and anecdotal reports on social media.
Microsoft scrambles to recover services
The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”
The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”
A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.
Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.
Governments, businesses from Japan to Australia affected
The British government said it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services but that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption.
British police forces said they’re unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call emergency responders to make any urgent reports.
The National Pharmacy Association said people could face delays getting their prescriptions because the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Service. Hospitals urged patients to attend appointments as usual.
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
